undefined | Better HN

0 pointsdefanor6mo ago0 comments

It is quite similar on the Web still: web browsers (at least Firefox) allow to set user CSS or change default colors, but some websites (the percentage would vary defending on the method used) do not play nicely with that.

Likewise on Unix-like systems: most things can be covered with GTK and Qt themes, but some GUI programs would use a different GUI toolkit, and occasional developers would assume a dark-on-light theme, setting fixed colors accordingly.

Even TUI color interfaces suffer from that: when programs use colors outside of the 16 (that are rather practical to configure) or tweak (e.g., dim, reverse/invert) those for a particular kind of theme.

An annoying thing is that in most those cases things would have been fine if the developers simply did not touch colors. Even the linked article would have been more legible if it had no CSS, with either the usual defaults or a sensibly configured web browser: now it has a text-to-background contrast ratio slightly below the minimum of 7 recommended by WCAG.

0 comments

ryandrake6mo ago

I’ve always firmly believed that the user should have ultimate control over the color, fonts, and overall design of the applications on his system. Not the developer. The developer should just be able to say “this is text” and the OS should respect the user’s chosen text color. The developer should be able to say “this is a window” and the system decides how it’s styled. Every new OS release and every new browser release, we drift farther away from that ideal. If we respected the user’s preferences, we’d have a consistently styled workspace, and all our tools would look and feel like they belonged together.

Handing all of this control over look and feel to developers was a major mistake, and we pay for it over and over by having tools we keep having to re-learn, that look and function slightly differently from each other.

skydhash6mo ago

A nice example are epub files. I've basically disable all publisher styles from my reader, especially for novels. Then you have that one file where it's all `div` in the html.

VerifiedReports6mo ago

Exactly. That's what made the Windows scheme editor so great.

I never had a problem building my applications in Visual Studio to respect the system color scheme.

VerifiedReports6mo ago

Yeah it's baffling that people see fit to override the user's text color, but then leave the background color up to chance; or vice versa. The result? Occasionally invisible text.

If you're going to set the colors of some elements, you have to set them all. It's not that hard a concept.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsdefanor6mo ago0 comments

0 comments

ryandrake6mo ago

skydhash6mo ago

A nice example are epub files. I've basically disable all publisher styles from my reader, especially for novels. Then you have that one file where it's all `div` in the html.

VerifiedReports6mo ago

Exactly. That's what made the Windows scheme editor so great.

I never had a problem building my applications in Visual Studio to respect the system color scheme.

VerifiedReports6mo ago

Yeah it's baffling that people see fit to override the user's text color, but then leave the background color up to chance; or vice versa. The result? Occasionally invisible text.

If you're going to set the colors of some elements, you have to set them all. It's not that hard a concept.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse