Browsers have a default style sheet that is used
for each element that the
web site does not specify a
style for. Some browsers have an option to let the
user specify his own style sheet.
Years ago, I set my style sheet to ignore
the
colours on a web site and use mine. I have mild
dyslexia. Bright ink on a
dark background is much
easier for me to read. This made the internet
much
more pleasant for me than books.
A web site's style sheet overrides the
entries
in the default style sheet or user style sheet.
That is easy to fix:
just add the word
important to all your changes.
Next comes an vital
piece of browser
design. Web designers obviously know the best colours for
everyone to use, so when they mark a style element as
important, that choice
takes precedence over anything
a user says is important. Fortunately many web
designers
do not know about important, but they have a much
nastier weapon: If
I say what the colour of text is
in a paragraph and the web designer specifies
the colour
of text in a paragraph that is contained in an ordered
list the
browser uses the web designer's colours for
paragraphs in an ordered list
because his instructions
are more specific.
For a while I tried adding
specific instructions
to my style sheets but that is a huge amount of work
and
prone to error everytime a web designer fiddles
with his site. Noddy's guide to
web design says that
if you change one colour you must change the other
three:
background, foreground, link and visited link.
Failure to do this means that
the colours you did
not specify come from a less specific entry in the
style
sheets. The vast majority of web designers
never reach Noddy level
understanding of style.
They change one of the colours by itself. The others
come from my style sheet and I get white text on a
white background. I can get
around that a little.
If I press control-A to select everything
I get the
colours for selected text that most web
designers do not play with.
For
a long time I used lynx because the lynx
browser gets lots of things right:
user's colours,
no flash, no javascript, no java and no animation.
Web
designers responded by using frames with cryptic
names. Lynx can only display
one frame at a time.
When it meets a page full of frames it shows a list
of
links to the individual frames with the web
designer's choice of frame
name.
At this point, I gave up and just learned to suffer
in silence.
Sometimes a style sheet fails to download.
My web browser waits for a while,
then falls back to
my style sheet. I get to see the web page as I chose,
and
can read the page with no effort.
Frames have gone out of fashion. Layout
is now
done in style sheets which lynx ignores. The results
on Groklaw are
quite good - better for me than any
of the themes. Time to try lynx again and
see if
it fixes the rest of the internet.
The really stupid thing about
all the trouble web
sites put into user selectable themes is
that if the web
designer did absolutely nothing
users would get their own choices.
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