Re: monochrome

On 24 Feb 2000, John Lewis wrote:

>Matthew Brealey wrote:
>
>>At present it is - colour ink is very expensive, so to waste
>>your customer/page viewer's money on colour ink, which adds
>>nothing to printed pages (black is almost always better and
>>much faster).
>
>Is something wrong with letting the user decide for himself?
>I'm not aware of any web browser that doesn't let the user
>choose how to print his documents--if there are problems
>that CSS should address, you have my apologies.

A page that looks OK on a colour display, or printed in colour, might
be hard to read in monochrome.  I read a UK paper that's printed in
colour in London and in mono in Manchester, and sometimes (presumably
when last-minute changes have been made) the Manchester edition is very
hard to read, usually because of a lack of contrast.

One solution is to design with a mono rendering in mind; another is to
distinguish style suggestions for colour and mono display.

-- 
Tim Bannister - isoma@compsoc.man.ac.uk
  "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
     - Benjamin Disraeli