HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
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Fonts vary widely among machines; the ones you use with your
browser that work fine with a background pattern often end up
jagged and difficult to read on another machine.
5.3.2.2. Problems with background, text, and link colors
You also will encounter a slew of problems if you play with background
colors, including the following:
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The color you choose, while just lovely in your eyes, may look ter-
rible to the user. Why annoy them by changing what users most
likely have already set as their own default background colors?
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While you may be a member of the "light text on a dark back-
ground" school of document design, many people also favor the
"dark text on a light background" style that has been consistently
popular for more than 3,000 years. Instead of bucking the trend,
assume that users have already set their browsers to a comfort-
able color scheme.
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Some users are colorblind. What may be a nifty-looking combin-
ation of colors to you may be completely unreadable to others.
One combination in particular to avoid is green for unvisited links
and red for visited links. Millions of men are afflicted with red/
green colorblindness.
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Your brilliant hue may not be available on the user's display, and
the browser may be forced to choose one that's close instead.
Some colors for the text and the background might be the same
color on limited-color displays!
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For the same reason just listed, active, unvisited, and visited links
may wind up as the same color on limited-color displays.
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By changing text colors, particularly those for visited and unvis-
ited links, you may completely confuse users. By changing those
colors, you effectively force them to experiment with your page,
clicking a few links here and there to learn your color scheme.
