Websites with no background-color
Wednesday, June 27, 2007Jeffry Zeldman has sparked an internet controvesy with this damning post revealing the dirty little secret many major websites and web designers would have hoped had gone unnoticed: they have not explicitly set body {background-color: #FFF}, instead choosing to reply on the fact that most browsers default to a white background.
Ummm... WHO F*CKING CARES!?!?!?!
As far as I'm concerned it's perfectly reasonable to forego setting a colour if the default white is fine. Hell, I like all my links underlined but I don't go explicitly setting a {text-decoration: underline} because I rely on the fact that it's default behaviour for every browser to do so.
Yes, it's true, one can override a website's CSS with one's own - turn link underlines off, set your own preferred background colour, set any CSS property. But here's the shocking truth: you are supposed to be allowed to do that. In fact if a user has set an overriding background colour they probably have a good reason to do so - perhaps they require a certain level of contrast - and nothing you do to your website's stylesheet will matter. Their setting can always override your own.
It seems the only people who are effected by not explicitly setting a background colour are people who do it for the sole purpose of spotting websites that do not explicitly set a background colour.
The issue isn't even a new one, do a search and it's pretty easy to find manyolderexamples of people taking screenshots of websites with pink backgrounds ...
Can we please return to sanity now?
10 Comments
The default isn't white. The default is whatever the hell the user has set it to be. So if you leave out the white background you could get anything at all. On my system it's grey; I have friends who set theirs to black; someone running a Hello Kitty system theme will probably get pink.
So if you just leave it out, your page of black text may get results ranging from lucking out with default white, looking silly with grey/pink/who knows, or being totally unusuable with black on black.
That's why you should care.
Umm older browsers and some currently seem to use #C0C0C0 as the default colour. Another reason you should give a bit of a one.
Yeah I take your point guys, I was merely reacting to the seemingly endless round of incredulous gasping coming from all and sundry and the silly posting of 'shame' shots of sites with pink backgrounds - as if this single crime would damn an otherwise professional web designer to the pits of amateurism.
I found the whole thing overblown.
"The default isn't white. The default is whatever the hell the user has set it to be."
And how many peple do that? The only people I know that do are power geeks (no offense intended, Ben!)
The older browser point is valid, but I don't know of any "modern" one that has a default background other than white. The biggies (FF, Safari, IE6&7) all go with white.
I'm with Andrew on this one... it's all gone a bit too far.
I'm as big a fan of accessible, usable, standards-based design as the next guy, but sometimes I think we all get a little shrill about something that, on the whole, isn't that much of a deal.
It's true you shouldn't forget to set white backgrounds. By changing windows colour schemes you could effect yor browser's default background color, not sure if it's still the case though.
It's okay not to set a background color, as long as you don't set a foreground color either. For accessibility, you should set both or neither.
How do you fix it?
Sorry, was not very clear. Disabled. Need color on the screen and large print.
"The biggies (FF, Safari, IE6&7) all go with white" False, FF and IE running under windows both take the OS background color.
My mum (who have nothing to do with a geek) use a light brown background to not kill her eyes. But she don't know how to do a screen shot so she never complain. Changing this is so easy, standard Windows appearences have non-white bg (Plum, Marine and the High Contrast ones). And I see more low QI secretary proud to customize set that kind of theme than developpers, even on Win XP. And those so many kidz that are all geekz are going to grow so take the good habit right now. And system administrator? A whole thousand officemates whith a non-white background choosed by their geeky sysadmin!
I'm an accessibility specialist but I not always make accessible site, depending on the aimed audience (no accessibility to blind people for graphic art portfolio as example). But accessibility brings natural ranking so making it a reflex keep being interesting.
I'm not sure I follow the last comment. My (WinXP) background is set to anything but white (black, blue etc.) yet that _never_ affects the default background colour of my browsers. Not sure what might have happened in your case Tex.