Re: Style sheet misuse advice

john@htmlhelp.com (John Pozadzides)
> If one were to set Text and Link colors using a style sheet, should one
> also define the background colors for these elements as well?

Right now, I frequently have to select text in order to read it, because
people use very dark backgrounds with black text.  So CSS is not necessarily
making things worse here.

Users who override a background colour might wish to override the foreground.
A browser user might want something like:
    try
	the author-supplied colours
	_this_ background colour and the author-supplied foregrounds
	_this_ foreground color set and the author-supplied backgrounds
	this colour set
    and take the first combination with acceptable contrast

but this is stretching CSS into something more like DSSSL or Netscape's
JaveScript Style Thingy, I think.  In practice, if you override the
default background colour in your browser, you may need to use multiple
style sheets to get satisfactory results, choosing the appropriate one
for each page.  Sounds like a lot of hassle.  Users can learn that if
the override the background colour, they should also override all of
the foreground colors, I think.

So is the onus on the browser user or the document author?

If you set any foreground text colour, it is certainly a good idea
to make sure that you have also set the background colour.  It is also
a very good idea to consider users who have disabled the display of
background images.

I think that both document authors and browser users need to be aware
of this issue.  Browsers with Preferences options to set colours can
help by showing a preview of text, linked text, visited linked text,
active linked text, blinking text :-) and whatever else they need
to distinguish.

Liam  (not the same Liam mentioned above)

Received on Tuesday, 28 January 1997 15:47:47 UTC