Re: Color Style Logic in Digital Documents

Hello Daniel,

On 2016/05/03 12:15, Daniel Yacob wrote:
> A small annoyance of mine is having to change MS Word's default header
> colors from blue to black.  I read somewhere that Microsoft determined that
> most of the documents produced with Word would be digital and that blue
> looked better on a screen.  I do like blue in the headers of W3C standards
> in HTML, but have never liked it in documents.  That's just my subjective
> view.
>
> Richard do you know the rationale behind the text color choices in W3C
> publications?

These color choices go way back to ca. 2000. See e.g.
https://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-19980210 and
https://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xml-20001006.

I think it mostly has to do with the W3C logo and its color.

> Presumably, blue headers would be universally desirable in all scripts and
> languages for digital documents.

I just wanted to try in my version of Word. But then I found out that I 
don't know how to tell it to make something a header. That's how rarely 
I use it. But anyway, I don't remember when I have last seen a document 
with blue headers, except for the W3C Technical Reports (and those that 
copied that style).

> Is blue acceptable for Ethiopic?

I have no idea, sorry.


> It occurs to me that it may be advantageous to apply a style sheet that set
> the color of hulet neteb to an off-black hue, perhaps a dark gray.  Which
> possibly would help it in its job as a word separator by being even more
> visually distinct while not distracting.  Is there a shade that would help
> increase line parsing and thus reading speed?

To answer that, you probably have to make actual experiments. But 
readability depends on many factors, so you may need quite a large 
number of subjects.

Regards,   Martin.

Received on Wednesday, 4 May 2016 11:59:22 UTC