Comments on: Invisible Text Selection: Background Inheritance

By: Joe Dolson

Joe Dolson — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 15:20:09 +0000

Man, I’m starting to feel all alone on this one…I’ve been annoyed by this issue for years! And here nobody else seems to even have noticed it…

Eh. Each to their own pet peeve, I guess.

By: Stevie D

Stevie D — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 12:23:02 +0000

I’ve never had a problem with not being able to highlight text on a web page. Most browsers I’ve used have default background and foreground colours for highlighted text. The only time it becomes a problem is when the background colour of the page is similar to the background colour of the highlight.

By: Joe Dolson

Joe Dolson — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 21:59:49 +0000

I’ve really never run into any serious problems using gray for my default background color. But then, what I’m using is not a custom browser setting - it’s a global Windows setting. Firefox ignores it, actually, and sticks to it’s own default.

IE, however, uses the Windows setting. On the whole, I prefer to only have it effecting settings in IE — - since I pretty much exclusively use it for testing, anyhow!

I use text highlighting as a pseudo-pointer when I’m navigating pages with other people to help them out or explain something on the page, so perhaps that causes the issue to stand out for me.

By: Mike Cherim

Mike Cherim — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 20:04:08 +0000

I used to use gray (great for testing at Accessites), but I ran into too many usability issues. I changed the default to #ffffcc. With this color I find that most text is more readable now, yet it still tells me in a heartbeat whether the developer has spec the background-color.

Regarding the text selection issue you’ve mentioned is something I have either not noticed or come across.

By: Joe Dolson

Joe Dolson — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 13:59:12 +0000

So do I - the vast expanse of white is just too bright for me. Those sorts of things really do stand out, don’t they!

By: Katy

Katy — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 10:41:53 +0000

I have my browser default background colour set to grey, it’s amazing how many websites fail to set a default page backround themselves and rely on the default settings on people’s browsers. And it’s not smaller sites that are failing to do this, several Google and Microsoft pages have no background set which makes them really difficult to use.