- From: Matthew Brealey <webmaster@richinstyle.com>
- Date: 9 Feb 2001 10:36:35 -0000
- To: kylev@yaga.com, www-style@w3.org
--- Kyle VanderBeek <kylev@yaga.com> wrote: > > I wanted to voice my frustration with a common problem in stylesheets (and > site design in general) that shows up in some of the stylesheets on the W3 > site (the "Recommendation" one, for example). > > I spend a lot of time reading generated documents that are very plain, > like HOWTOs, FAQs, and software documentation. No stylesheets, and just a > plain <BODY> tag. To save my eyes, I'm using a nice "theme" in the KDE > window environment. This theme changes some of the default colors of the > Konqueror web browser. Most notably, my link color is a pale yellow (this > shows up great on the default dark-grey background). > > The problem arises when a site designer fails to realize this fact. It is > a common miscoception that all user agents have the same default colors as > the original Mozilla (grey or white background, blue/purple/red links, > black text). This is becoming less and less true as more platforms pop > up, and ideas like "themes" and "skins" become popular. Even before this, > users have been able to set their "default colors" in most browsers. > > In the case of W3 "Recommendations", all link text becomes completely > unreadable to me (my yellow link color on your white background color). > > If I have read the specifications correctly, this is the correct behaviour > (allow unspecified attributes to "cascade" back to the user agent > settings). I don't believe there are any specifications that say what > these default settings must be, so a "themed" set of colors is fully > appropriate. > > The solution is, of course, to be explicit about colors that may interact > (simply: "If you override one color, you should override them all"). In > this case, the stylesheet should specify the A:link set of pseudo-classes > since link text will be on top of the specified background. Failing to > do so produces unpredictable results in the user agent. You are quite correct in this, and this is indeed a deficiency on the W3C site; although, by no means restricted to this site - when incompetent CSS is even built into the world's most popular browser [Internet Explorer] [*], it seems that we aren't likely to get 'correct' and accessible style sheets any time soon. > First, I'd like to see the W3 stylesheets "fixed" so I can again read W3 > specifications in Konqueror. This would be a good idea. However, it doesn't really address the wider problem of bad websites, which IMHO, will only get worse as more people use style sheets - it's far easier to create a bad style sheet that assumes that the user is using Internet Explorer with the factory settings, than to create an accessible one. With websites now created: (a) using tagsoup tools such as Dreamweaver and Front Page (b) according to the final result rather than by formatting a structured document (c) by incompetent programmers the problem will only get worse (particularly as programs like Dreamweaver will make it even easier to integrate your bad CSS into a site). The standard complacent response to you would be to suggest that you create a user style sheet. [something like: BODY {background: #ddd !important; color: black !important} A {color: #ffcc00 !important}] However, these are much easier said than done, and don't, quite frankly, provide a consistent solution - it is difficult to get the same style sheet to work on pages made from tables with backgrounds and on pages with margins on the body element. [Incidentally, I'm not sure if Konqueror allows you to use user style sheets; it certainly didn't last time I used it, but that was v1.93.] This turns out to be a user agent issue, since it's not [short of legislative changes of the kind that have been applied in Australia, and that apply in the USA to governmental organisations] really possible to effect changes to the ever growing tide of such websites. As a result, you might like to investigate improving Konqueror's handling of this issue, or else use Opera, which has a variety of ways of dealing with this issue, including hotkey togglable style sheets, the ability to disable parts of the document's style [tables, colours, fonts, etc.], etc. > Second, I think it would be good to include > mention of the issues I am raising in this email in a future edition of > relevant recommendations (HTML, XHTML, and CSS all come to mind). Indeed. This specific issue has been mentioned before. However, it is neither appropriate nor possible to provide a complete list of recommendations; furthermore, too few people read and fully digest the specification for it to make any difference. * Try Tools/Internet Options, and then Accessibility. Click ignore font sizes and ignore font styles. Then go to res://madeup. This brings up a 404 page, which will be unsightly in the extreme because of the use of an absolute size (11pt) for line-height. This bad CSS is unfortunately present in every single page in Internet Explorer.
Received on Friday, 9 February 2001 05:36:20 UTC