Time for another edition of "Define Your Background Color, Dammit!" The game where I pick a few Web sites that haven’t done their testing. For illustrative purposes, I’m including screenshots this time. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts on this subject, the problem is that these sites are assuming that you haven’t changed the default background color in your browser preferences.
First up is a company that wants to carry all your important voice traffic. It’s Vonage! See the screenshot on why they need to define their background color. The problem is consistent across the site, too.
Next up: 10 x 10, a site that displays photographs gleaned from news reports. Some of the pages are fine, others, like the home page and the photo page both need to define a background color. See the screenshot.
Never one to play favorites, many of the sites of my current employer (the new AT&T, a Voltron-like combination of SBC and the old AT&T, but without the cool sword) have the background color problem. One of my favorites is Project D.U. (see the screenshot). You’d think with the "headlines from 30 blogs, commentary from 9 editors and 1,000s of links" that someone would have noticed the problem.
Taking a look at my last list of offenders, I see that SBC (the new AT&T) has fixed their problem (after we pointed it out to them). The other sites, though, still suffer the same problem. Office Depot still being pretty bad.
The quick and easy fix? Add background-color: #fff; to the CSS for the body tag. Should take all of three minutes.
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 26th, 2006 at 10:04 pm and is filed under Web Standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Responses to “Define Your Background Color, Dammit!”
Interesting. In my FF browser, these sites all have normal looking white backgrounds. I never set a bg color. I guess FF sets white as a default. Those grey bg screenshots look pretty bad.
January 28th, 2006 at 12:03 am |
I really don’t see the point of having to set a background color when the default color is white for 99.9% of visitors. Makes me wonder why anyone would change it from the default.
February 7th, 2006 at 5:56 pm |
It’s just a good practice: when defining any foreground color, it makes sense to check that your background color is also defined (or that is is cascading properly). And just think, a quick fix will take less time than writing a justification for not fixing it. :)
February 7th, 2006 at 8:22 pm |
AlexV, that’s a lazy and very shortsighted view. Years ago, the default background color for a majority of users was grey. What happens if (/when) it changes again?
(I’ve got my FF default background set to a mid-level grey to let me know when I forget to set a bgcolor.)
February 9th, 2006 at 9:51 am |
I set my background color to gray because brilliant white backgrounds are aggravating to my migraines.
M.C. Escher longed for a drawing medium made up of 50% gray with white and black drawing implements.
I long for partial transparencies in images and an image that can contrast adaptively to the background it is positioned on.
Anti-aliasing is the wrong solution to a problem.
February 9th, 2006 at 11:55 am |
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