Wiki Background Color

Around March 12, 2000, Wiki started using <BODY bgColor=white>. It is preferable to leave out the bgColor tag, because Wiki can then default to the user's own color preferences.

Is it possible to restore the old behavior?

Perhaps this new behavior could be a user preferences thing invoked by cookies, with the default being no tag? -- ChanningWalton

Technically it is a bug, in that if your browser has your text set to white and the background to black, Wiki's setting the background colour only will make the text disappear. Some people need their funny colours because of poor eyesight, poor laptop screens or whatever. -- DaveHarris Then they should set their browser preferences correctly. On Netscape 4: Edit->Preferences->Appearance/Colors, turn on: "Always use my colors, overriding document", and turn off "Use Windows colors". However, MSIE doesn't seem to have this capability.

So is the problem that I set the bgcolor without setting all the other ones? [Yes, this is indeed problematic. If you use one of these tags, you should set them all.] Or is the problem some complicated heuristic some browsers use to choose colors? Or is that old gray really a preferred color? [Not every browser defaults to a gray background (e.g. HotJava's default is white). Moreover, this default background color can be set by the user.] I'm asking because I changed all the static html on c2.com in addition to the one line of wiki that emits the tag. I'll change them all again if I have to. I'd just like for them to be consistent. -- WardCunningham

Well, I just fed the FrontPage through weblint, and I found the following problems:

There are no <html>...</html> tags around the whole document.
You don't provide ALT=... tags for images.
There's a </form> tag without matching <form>.
In <a href=quickDiff?FrontPage>, the URL should be quoted, like this: <a href="quickDiff?FrontPage">

IOW you just...AcceptanceTested this Wiki...?

Moreover, you should really be using cascading style sheets instead of bgcolor=... tags. Those color tags aren't standardized by the W3C, IIRC.

Pedantically yours, -- monkey

No version of Netscape 4.x supports CSS correctly. Mozilla has a new rendering engine that does. Although, it is possible to write CSS that 'works' for Netscape 4.x - you just have to be a lot more picky about the way you do it, and accept that a lot of the stuff you expect to work correctly won't. This is an unfortunate part of being JustAnHtmlCoder.

I've often wondered about how setting my webpage colours affects colour-blind people... ==> cf. MeatballWiki, http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?ColourBlind -- SunirShah

What about some sort of system where users could define their own stylesheets? For instance: I don't want to define a sheet to use everywhere, but it'd be pretty easy for more advanced users to publish a stylesheet somewhere on the web and store the URL to it in a cookie. When the server detects the URL, it can just drop in a tag at the top of each page. (Beyond this, somebody could create a few default sheets for UtterNonNerds.) Or, we could just leave it white. -- JasonAnderson

You could do this at your browser by specifying a default StyleSheet for it to use. I believe all the major browsers support this. -- ChanningWalton [Examples?]

Times have since changed - today (2008) most browsers default to black-on-white, so if all color styling were left off from Wiki, it would just do the right thing. And when the system theme modifies the defaults, Wiki would follow the system and everything will still be fine.

CategoryWiki