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Woodlands | 241 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Woodlands
Authored by: SpaceLifeForm on Friday, November 02 2012 @ 08:45 PM EDT
Very few issues over the years.

---

You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw themes
Authored by: PJ on Friday, November 02 2012 @ 09:28 PM EDT
Most of the geeks seem to use Blue. I stick
with Woodlands2 usually, because pale green is
restful for me and I'm here a lot staring at
the site.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Prefer user style sheet
Authored by: ailuromancy on Saturday, November 03 2012 @ 01:14 AM EDT

Browsers have a default style sheet that is used for each element that the web site does not specify a style for. Some browsers have an option to let the user specify his own style sheet. Years ago, I set my style sheet to ignore the colours on a web site and use mine. I have mild dyslexia. Bright ink on a dark background is much easier for me to read. This made the internet much more pleasant for me than books.

A web site's style sheet overrides the entries in the default style sheet or user style sheet. That is easy to fix: just add the word important to all your changes. Next comes an vital piece of browser design. Web designers obviously know the best colours for everyone to use, so when they mark a style element as important, that choice takes precedence over anything a user says is important. Fortunately many web designers do not know about important, but they have a much nastier weapon: If I say what the colour of text is in a paragraph and the web designer specifies the colour of text in a paragraph that is contained in an ordered list the browser uses the web designer's colours for paragraphs in an ordered list because his instructions are more specific.

For a while I tried adding specific instructions to my style sheets but that is a huge amount of work and prone to error everytime a web designer fiddles with his site. Noddy's guide to web design says that if you change one colour you must change the other three: background, foreground, link and visited link. Failure to do this means that the colours you did not specify come from a less specific entry in the style sheets. The vast majority of web designers never reach Noddy level understanding of style. They change one of the colours by itself. The others come from my style sheet and I get white text on a white background. I can get around that a little. If I press control-A to select everything I get the colours for selected text that most web designers do not play with.

For a long time I used lynx because the lynx browser gets lots of things right: user's colours, no flash, no javascript, no java and no animation. Web designers responded by using frames with cryptic names. Lynx can only display one frame at a time. When it meets a page full of frames it shows a list of links to the individual frames with the web designer's choice of frame name.

At this point, I gave up and just learned to suffer in silence. Sometimes a style sheet fails to download. My web browser waits for a while, then falls back to my style sheet. I get to see the web page as I chose, and can read the page with no effort.

Frames have gone out of fashion. Layout is now done in style sheets which lynx ignores. The results on Groklaw are quite good - better for me than any of the themes. Time to try lynx again and see if it fixes the rest of the internet.

The really stupid thing about all the trouble web sites put into user selectable themes is that if the web designer did absolutely nothing users would get their own choices.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

  • lynx - Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, November 03 2012 @ 02:42 AM EDT
  • suggestion.. - Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, November 03 2012 @ 07:04 PM EDT
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