Re: CSS 3 color module and deprecation of "system" colors

On Saturday 2005-09-03 15:42 +0100, Patrick H. Lauke wrote [archived
at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2005Sep/0010.html ]:
> Apologies for cross posting, but: could anybody shed some light as to
> why system colors have been deprecated in the CSS 3 color module?
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/CR-css3-color-20030514/#css-system
>
> In my recent testing on Windows browsers, I found them to be fairly well
> supported and would posit that they can have quite a valuable role to
> play in creating accessible style sheets that match the user's set
> colour scheme / preferences (e.g. if a user has set their Windows
> environment to High Contrast, a web page can be styled to follow that
> preference).

On Saturday 2005-09-03 21:05 -0400, Matthew Raymond wrote [in
response to the message above, archived at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2005Sep/0011.html ]:
>    I have to wonder about this myself. Just because you want to use a
> specific system color doesn't mean you want a specific "appearance". It
> may be that you're using DHTML to create a custom widget, in which case
> the widget would use the system colors without necessarily looking like
> any specific system control.

This has been recorded as
http://csswg.inkedblade.net/spec/css3-color#issue-16 .

I believe the primary reason for their deprecation is that colors
are not sufficient to represent the appearance of many system
controls, which use gradients, more complex shading, varying border
styles, etc.  See also
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2005Sep/0019.html and
the responses to comments 11, 14, and 15 in
http://www.w3.org/Style/2003/css3-color-comments.html .

The group discussed this issue briefly at our face-to-face meeting
in San Diego and decided to let the previous decision to deprecate
the system colors stand; thus the editors draft at
http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-color/#css2-system is unchanged in this
regard.

If you are not satisfied with this response, please let us know
within two weeks, if possible.

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                 http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation                       http://www.mozilla.com/

Received on Monday, 12 May 2008 23:57:30 UTC