let's put an end to INVISIBLE TEXT
From: Gavin Stokes (gstokes@enteract.com)
Date: Thu, Jan 13 2000
Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 19:09:32 -0500 (EST)
Message-Id: <4.2.0.58.20000113175730.00a37b70@pop.enteract.com>
To: www-validator@w3.org
From: Gavin Stokes <gstokes@enteract.com>
Subject: let's put an end to INVISIBLE TEXT
So many Web pages suffer from unintentionally invisible text. It's such an
easy problem to prevent, and yet it's rampant. Certain tools even generate
HTML that causes the problem, such as Macromedia Dreamweaver.
Please add a check for this to the HTML validator.
The validator needs to ensure that, if either the background color or the
text color is set, they are both set. Typically you'll find that the
background has been set to white, but the text color is left
undefined. The text will then be displayed in whatever color the user's
operating system normally uses for text. What if that color is white? You
wind up with white text on a white background.
If you want to see this defect in action, go into the Windows Control
Panel's Display / Appearance options. Select the "High contrast black"
color scheme. Or, because that scheme is admittedly not too attractive,
just change the window background color to dark blue and the window text
color to white. Much better than the glaring inverse video that Windows
and the Mac OS ship with. Now press OK and check out
www.wildcat.com/Site/Home.htm. Or just browse through the Macromedia
site. They're one of the biggest offenders out there.
All the validator has to do is make sure there's a TEXT= tag after every
BGCOLOR= tag, and it has to make sure that Web pages that specify a
background color (or background graphic!) also set the font color in every
style in their style sheets.
Gavin Stokes