Re: Cursors - New Proposals

Yes, applying color to multicolored cursors would cause problems, which SVG or
an alpha-channel mask might help overcome. However, I'd appreciate the ability
to colorize black-and-white or grayscale cursors. A mostly-white cursor on a
mostly-white page, or similarly for black-on-black? How could anyone be
expected to track that well? A cursor the opposite (i.e., masked) color of the
background, or colorized nicely--not neon-bright, but bright; maybe red--would
help.

The Mac can certainly have grayscale cursors; I don't recall any color cursors
at the moment, but I'm not sure.

In a message dated 1/12/99 3:25:01 PM Central Standard Time, Ian Hickson
(py8ieh@bath.ac.uk) writes, and his message is surrounded by << and >>:

<< On Tue, 12 Jan 1999, L. David Baron replied to Albert Lui's Coloured
 Cursors Proposals thusly:
 > I think the idea of specifying properties on elements is a good one,
 > and I don't see a reason to give it up. Normally one would want to
 > specify a cursor change over an already existing element, anyway. If
 > not, one could create an appropriate element.
 Absolutely.
 
 > I tend to think that manipulation of colors within an image should
 > be beyond the scope of CSS.
 While I agree with this statement in terms of multi-color raster
 images, it should be pointed out that monochrome pictures (both raster
 and SVG) could easily have their two colours modified by CSS: using
 the 'color' property for the foreground and 'background'-color for the
 background. Indeed, this is one of the suggestions on the W3C CSS
 ideas document.
 
 > I don't think I have ever seen a colored cursor in Windows, and I
 > don't know if it can be done.
 Win32 has had animated 256 colour cursors since early 1995.
 
 > I haven't seen any on Mac or Unix either.
 I believe Unix can also do colour cursors, since IIRC X Windows uses
 the same format for cursors as for icons, and icons can be coloured.
 
 -- 
 Ian Hickson
  >>

Received on Tuesday, 12 January 1999 16:56:15 UTC