Re: [w3ctag/design-reviews] CSS find-in-page highlight pseudos (Issue #1120)

matatk left a comment (w3ctag/design-reviews#1120)

Thanks @schenney-chromium for your updates on this thread. Sorry for my slow reply in return.

There's a key question we should discuss: is finding text on the page a feature of a _web page_, or a feature of the UA? Should users have an expectation that the feature will work in the same way across sites? If a feature is inconsistent (even in appearance) it could confuse users, or lead them to believe that only some pages provide it.

A much more extreme example of this would be the 'toolbar' widgets that can be added to pages, to allow the user to customise the page's appearance (font size, colour, etc.) These provide useful features, but exposing them on a per-page basis can lead users to believe that only some pages support them. Whilst it's an extreme example, it does show that consistency and discoverability are important factors.

Allowing authors to be able to customise the way that find-in-page is presented seems like a reasonable idea. Ensuring that the default presentation of this feature is accessible is critical. Personally, I'd really want UAs to offer an option to let me override any author-specified colours here - at least providing users the choice to always use the UA's known-accessible appearance. (I have a vision impairment, but am trying to be as general as possible.)

In the case that authors _do_ provide their own colours, we should at least advise the authors that this means they'll need to ensure sufficient contrast in...

* light and dark display modes

* situations where the design of the site (e.g. foreground/background) change - this also invites the question as to whether the colours would need to remain consistent, or would react to the site design (each of those possibilities have different potential costs).

We have discussed the way that Safari renders the find-in-page UI in this thread. That rendering - in which the page context _except_ for matches is dimmed - is part of how the UA guarantees sufficient contrast. Whilst we would not seek to tell UAs how to do their UX, it's worth noting that this rendering isn't possible for authors to achieve within the current proposal, because the parts of the page that aren't matches cannot have their appearance modified.

In summary:

* Is find-in-page a _page_ or a _UA_ feature?

* Have you considered whether the UA might render the results in a more profound way than the spec supports?

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