Re: CSS Validator Question

Speaking from the stand point of someone who picked out their own color
scheme for their computer, i soon discovered what a royal pain in the @$$ it
is when web "designers" set the foreground color of an element without
setting the background, or vice versa.  Some of my favorite faux pas
include:

 - Site graphics with a white background that ends abruptly at the edges of
the image because they assumed my default background was white, not tan.

- Setting the background color for form elements without setting the
foreground color.  This one burns my ass.  My buttons used to look good with
silver text against a charcoal background, but Yahoo's mail interface uses
like a sky blue background on the buttons, making the text virtually
invisible.


There have been too many various color atrocities commited for me to recall
them all, but they stem from the false belief that i have the same default
color scheme as whoever designed these pages.  Some cases yield ugly
results, while others yield pages that are completely unusable, as in the
case of my form controls.  You can't assume that everyone has black text on
a white background -- furthermore you can't even assume that its going to be
dark on light.  If you don't believe me, take a look at some of the color
schemes that come packaged with windows.

You shouldn't have to declare a background color EVERYTIME you declare a
foreground color, so long as some cascading is occuring. ("huh"?)

Take this example:

DIV {
  padding:1em;
  border:solid 1px #999;
  background-color:#339;
  color:#999;
}

DIV A {
  color:#FFF;
}


This produces silver text on a dark blue background, and white text on
anchors.  Tacky? Sure.  Visible? Yes.  And it doesn't matter that i didn't
define a background when i defined the foreground color for my anchor tag,
because its inherited from the DIV.  Setting the background color of every
child element would be unnecessary, not to mention a pain if you ever chose
to change from a solid blue background color to a blue background pattern.

I'm not sure how specific the W3C validator is, whether or not they require
a back-/foreground color pair with every selector;  however, you shouldn't
be relying on the user's default color scheme to flesh out your incomplete
color scheme.



While on the subject, i'd also like to recommend to everyone to pick out
some colors for your printed style sheet, namely black and white.  Its
frustrating to have to print out a web page in black ink and squint to read
the text because its dithered poorly from some other color.  Text should be
printed in black, end of story.




~b






----- Original Message -----
From: <Matthew.van.Eerde@hbinc.com>
To: <www-style@w3.org>
Sent: Friday, September 12, 2003 6:21 PM
Subject: RE: CSS Validator Question


>
> I personally found these warnings annoying as I frequently use one without
> the other.  I'm glad they're gone as they distract from more important
> issues.
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Scott Montgomery [mailto:scott@scottshelly.com]
> > Sent: Thursday, September 04, 2003 11:15 PM
> > To: www-style@w3.org
> > Subject: CSS Validator Question
> >
> >
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > I noticed yesterday that the W3C CSS validator no longer
> > issues a warning
> > when just color or background-color is declared in a rule.
> > It used to warn
> > about the absence of color or background-color when one was
> > declared and
> > the other was not.  Does anyone know if this has been
> > "officially" changed?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Scott Montgomery
> >
>
>

Received on Friday, 12 September 2003 23:07:58 UTC