I am fed up with sites that use green on black or summat..
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| Ridcully Sep 04, 2010 7:17 AM EDT |
This was an article I was very interested in reading, only to be hit by an optical barrier....And immediately removed myself from the site when my optical nerves began to fry after I hit "green text on a black background". I have seen articles that say it is easier on the eyes to read white text on black........but convention says black text on white; the printed page says black text on white.......and frankly, I would really like to read this blasted article, but my eyes (which both have new lenses after cataract surgery) tell me that the current status of green text on a black background is just about impossible to read and remain sane. Please TextEdMacs........help........Or someone tell the author that his story stands on its content, not on its decoration. |
| bigg Sep 04, 2010 8:01 AM EDT |
There are firefox extensions, but you can also manually stop pages from choosing their own colors. > Edit > Preferences > Content tab > Colors... > Uncheck appropriate box |
| bigg Sep 04, 2010 8:12 AM EDT |
Also, I sometimes use the TidyRead extension. I just checked it out, and the page automatically comes up without the unfortunate color scheme. |
| Ridcully Sep 04, 2010 8:28 AM EDT |
Yep........many thanks "bigg" ~ it's an attribute in FFox I have rarely used, if ever - but I will sure remember it now..........I used the Edit>Preferences>Content tab>Colour.......uncheck and it works great. Thanks a million...........But from my point of view.......how downright STOOOPID of the author. I shall read and then recheck the box because generally speaking, it is important to see the colours that authors have included. Ta muchly. |
| gus3 Sep 04, 2010 12:50 PM EDT |
There's also the Readability project at arc90.com. Or, for a quick solution on just that page: > View > Page Style > No style I prefer that to a global preference switch. |
| TxtEdMacs Sep 04, 2010 8:13 PM EDT |
Ridcully, [serious] Sorry I am no help here. Just hearing green on black turns me off or just seeing similar pages most times* makes me hit the back button immediately. Moreover, most times I find sites with similar, weird color combinations nearly physically painful. However, due to being forewarned and your request for lambasting the creator I lingered more than I might have. Oddly to me it was readable, in the abstract sense, but due to my computer problem being obviously hardware** I had no interest in the content. So how could I complain, even for one of my buddies? * I have preserved where despite my hate for the appearance, I forced myself to read sites with terrible color combinations seemingly meant to drive those unfortunate readers to distraction. Or more likely, the target audience is untroubled, having consumed considerable amounts of pharmaceutical concoctions, that they feel no pain. ** Booting into Linux impossible on one of my machines, even after altering the system BIOS. [/serious] YBT P.S. Did I misplace the ending tag? |
| Ridcully Sep 04, 2010 8:31 PM EDT |
Thanks TextEdMacs........Bigg gave me the easiest answer (a switch in FFox) which worked very nicely just for this dreadful script and was then changed back to normal afterwards. And thanks also to Gus3 ~ who pitched in with the Readability project. I know I said that I have two new lenses; the problem is only that they work extremely well and I now have exceptionally acute vision suitable for airline pilots so that pages using the colour coordination of that particular site are very uncomfortable to view - it's something like putting two complementary colours together when they clash horribly. I've said this before and have pleasure in saying it again: It always gives me a marvellous feeling the way Linux users on this site respond so rapidly to even an oblique call for help, despite the original posting being part serious and part humorous......Thanks everybody, most sincerely. It's great to belong to this community. |
| caitlyn Sep 04, 2010 9:48 PM EDT |
I promise never to build a site with fuscia text on a bright purple background. Other than that all bets are off :) The green on black doesn't bother me. It's a retro '70s terminal look except for the font. |
| tracyanne Sep 04, 2010 10:14 PM EDT |
Quoting:It's a retro '70s terminal look except for the font. Never could read that sort of terminal even when it wasn't retro. Personally I took one look at the page and the author lost a reader. Some people really need to spend more time living in the real world and a whole lot less trying to be cool graphics designers, they just don't have the talent. |
| caitlyn Sep 04, 2010 11:11 PM EDT |
Why do they need to do that? Why can't people design their website the way it suits them? Why must they get the tracyanne seal of approval? Different people have different tastes. What's awful to you is wonderful to someone else and vice versa. |
| Ridcully Sep 04, 2010 11:39 PM EDT |
Probably Caitlyn, because people like to be comfortable as they read. If you are irritated by the format of the page you are trying to read, you are less likely to take in critical information and hurry through it in order to get away from the displeasing situation.......In other words, the author is self-sabotaging what he or she desires: satisfied, large numbers of readers.......We strike precisely what this author has done in a local printed newsheet in which the editor literally goes insane with colours, fonts and backgrounds.......it is extremely annoying when you are trying to get information out of the document and you can so easily miss stuff you want. And I point out that graphic design is an art.......Not everybody is an artist in that area and it is so easy to make horrible errors in presentation. I certainly am not a graphical designer, but I do know what I like and appreciate, and this site was one I did not. |
| gus3 Sep 05, 2010 1:04 AM EDT |
Quoting:Why do they need to do that? Why can't people design their website the way it suits them? Why must they get the tracyanne seal of approval?Some people, who fancy themselves "creative" designers, create designs that overwhelm the content. They forget the first rule of the BLINK tag: Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. If it were up to me, there would never be an absolute pixel-size for fonts (no "font-size: Npx" in CSS). Different combinations of video resolutions and monitor dimensions produce different pixel sizes, so setting a font to be N pixels high may produce readable text on one system, but completely inaccessible text somewhere else. The combined video hardware and device drivers should determine how many pixels high for a point size. For a good example of a site that violates that rule, one need look no further than Yahoo!. Any site that uses the YahooUI codebase according to Yahoo!'s "best practice" suffers this violation of good CSS etiquette. My own CSS never overrides the user's default font face or font size. If someone has selected larger/heavier fonts as their defaults, I won't question why. From what I can see, LXer espouses the same philosophy. The Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/WAI/ is a good place to learn about being kind to the atypical Web surfer. |
| tracyanne Sep 05, 2010 2:30 AM EDT |
Quoting:Why do they need to do that? Why can't people design their website the way it suits them? They can do as they damned well please, what they can't realistically expect, is to get people to read their articles, for quite a few reasons. 1/ the prospective reader is put off by the "design" 2/ the prospective reader has trouble viewing the text against the background, due to insufficient contrast (two dark colours of similar brightness values can do this) 3/ the prospective reader has trouble reading the text due to too much contrast (white text on black backgrounds tend to have this effect, for me due to my astigmatism the white text bleeds and becomes unreadable) 4/ It's too hard to follow the text, Magazines published on the web (usually as PDFs) in the same format at the paper magazine (ie with columns) are difficult to read (various Ubuntu magazines do exactly this), because you are having to scroll back to the top for the next column. |
| patrokov Sep 06, 2010 5:14 PM EDT |
The fix is even easier than installing a Firefox extension. Just highlight the text, and it usually become readable. BTW, the theory is that it reduces eye fatigue by making the appearance of the letters larger. However, I think most of that mechanism went away as we transitioned from CRTs (where the brightness bleeds) to LCDs. That said, I do think that reading with a dark background is preferable for night, because your eyes are not bathed in a bright white light, making it easier to go to bed...and also not wake up the other family member(s) in the room. |
| hkwint Sep 06, 2010 7:56 PM EDT |
Ridcully: You should be glad you're fed up with sites that use green on black. I'm fed up with sites that use black on white. AutoCAD is about the only application which just "gets it", it seems. And AD Inventor isn't doing to bad either, it taught me using "book-like" yellow as a background. It helps quite a lot in my opinion. I also tried changing the background color using some Firefox-menu, but it changes too much in my opinion. So now I'm back to the scheme which hurts my eyes. Apart from myself, why not have some little HTML / JavaScript on the website to change the colors? Shouldn't be that hard, I think LXer has it! |
| gus3 Sep 06, 2010 10:31 PM EDT |
Hans, take a look at my home page: http://gus3.typepad.com/ Especially check the combo box at the top left. The same functionality (ihatethatword) is also available in the Mozilla browsers, under View -> Page Style, but AFAIK not in MSIE. And thanks to a little thing called "cookies," it will remember what you choose. |
| Scott_Ruecker Sep 06, 2010 11:45 PM EDT |
You can change the colors of the LXer layout of you wish, it is on the user member page where you access the LXer e-mail system timezone preferences.. |
| gus3 Sep 07, 2010 12:27 AM EDT |
Scott: Really? The only thing I see on that page is the preferred timezone. Maybe you mean this page: http://lxer.com/members/layout.php (Registered members only!) |
| Scott_Ruecker Sep 07, 2010 2:11 AM EDT |
Yeah yeah..that's the ticket..;-) |
| hkwint Sep 07, 2010 9:36 AM EDT |
Just found out again, about LXer's layout settings. Now I have to find out what color defines what. |
| Steven_Rosenber Sep 08, 2010 3:40 PM EDT |
Remember those sweet green-on-black monitors from the '80s? |
| Scott_Ruecker Sep 08, 2010 6:29 PM EDT |
Here you go Hans.. http://www.december.com/html/spec/color.html |
| cr Sep 08, 2010 7:30 PM EDT |
Quoting: Remember those sweet green-on-black monitors from the '80s? Yeah, I remember. Sweet? I suppose, if you didn't mind slow and hot with a side-order of hardware failure. Some of those terminals needed a few nulls after every linefeed to give 'em time to catch up, just like printers. Oh, yeah, and the high-pitched whine that got louder and louder until the Televideo 925 went dark (I was lucky that ITC Electronics on DeSoto had a mylar capacitor that could replace the aluminum electrolytic that went dry in the flyback circuit, and that I could find someplace to tie-wrap such a bulky component to the video chassis).... And the way that both of my WYSE-50's developed terminal key-bounce in their proprietary keyboards, making CP/M even more irritating to work with... And the patch-area in WordStar that had to be tweaked with a terminal's escape-sequences before you got good full-screen editing, because, for CP/M, CON: meant a KSR-33 teletype. (In VDO25, my preferred editor because it wasn't always accessing the floppies so it wasn't as slooooow as WordStar with the bigger files, they had to be assembled in instead.) Back then, if I'd been smart, I would have designed a board to connect a PC-XT or PC-AT keyboard to an ISA monochrome card and a serial port. Then everything about that serial terminal but the CPU board itself would have been off-the-shelf replaceable commodity hardware. A WYSE-50 had a single 8052 MCU at its heart, so a cheap microcontroller could have run it. These days, a older desktop or laptop running minicom on linux is the way to go for reliable serial access IMO. |
| Steven_Rosenber Sep 09, 2010 1:15 AM EDT |
adm3a all the way!!!!!! |
| cr Sep 09, 2010 2:21 AM EDT |
Quoting: adm3a all the way!!!!!! Until it becomes a terminak |
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