[css-colors] Specify the System Colors colors

[[
User agents must support these keywords, but should map them to "default"  
values, not based on the user's OS settings (for example, mapping all the  
"background" colors to white and "foreground" colors to black).
]]
-- http://tabatkins.github.io/specs/css-color/Overview.html#system-colors

Using just black and white seems unnecessarily boring. It's also not so  
clear which ones are backgrounds and which are foregrounds.

I think if we are to specify a fixed set of colors that these map to, we  
might as well be close to what browsers already have, so that sites that  
use them don't become uglier than necessary or get unreadable text.

I requested screenshots from different OSes here

http://www.browserstack.com/screenshots/67610195dac7cc4cb12206dd2589f08b3d0a7c02

and gathered the results in a spreadsheet

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2013Aug/att-0026/system-colors.csv

What I found interesting was that Android and iOS use the exact same  
mapping for CSS system colors. I think that makes that set a reasonable  
candidate to require in the spec.

-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software

Received on Friday, 30 August 2013 10:29:07 UTC