Comments on: Foreground the Background

by: eric

Sat, 03 Dec 2005 16:43:10 +0000

Well, the thing about OS X in general is that selected text is always the color you chose in the system appearance preferences (except, apparently, with the CSS3 selector Paul mentions). If you chose light blue, then every site on the planet is selected with a light blue foreground. That’s right, not background. Here’s an example (ion, I hope to god you allow images, cause you don’t do preview ;P ):

by: Paul D

Sat, 03 Dec 2005 16:02:42 +0000

There’s actually a CSS3 selector which lets you set the colour and background colour of selected text. Only Safari, as far as I know, has implemented it fully. I doubt we’ll see it in IE for years to come, though.

by: Michael Heilemann

Sat, 03 Dec 2005 08:40:05 +0000

You should be a selectin’ mofo when it comes to choosing an OS instead ;)

(sorry, couldn’t help it). Merry Christmas! :D

by: Chris P.

Sat, 03 Dec 2005 04:30:58 +0000

I’m surprised someone actually came out and mentioned this, but it’s something that has been driving me nuts for some time. I figured that it was a styling issue, but being tied up with other things, I pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have to deal with it and move on.

The dark vs. light background explanation is clearly the answer here, but this is, of course, intrinsically tied to other variables like the browser’s rendering platform.

Don’t let it happen to your site! And if it is, fix it up, cause I’m a selectin’ mofo when it comes to readin on the net.

by: ionfish

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 17:56:41 +0000

And that’s on the dark version? Obviously it won’t be a problem on the lighter skins, because the body’s light background colour will mean that the selection is set to a dark background and white text, rather than the other way round.

by: Dave

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 17:54:09 +0000

When I first looked at it, it was in IE6 on Windows XP (what I’m supposed to be using at work).

But I also just looked at it in FF 1.0.6 and still didn’t get the problem on Binary Bonsai.

(BTW

by: Moe

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 13:38:03 +0000

The text highlights according to your “should be” example for me on both sites, using Windows XP and Opera 8.5.

by: ionfish

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 12:31:18 +0000

Well, in the case of Jonathan’s site that would be because he fixed it; what browser and operating system are you using?

by: Dave

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 12:29:26 +0000

That’s odd, because I see exactly what you say should be seen on both sites. I don’t get your result at all.

by: ionfish

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 10:19:31 +0000

Firefox on Windows XP, although I had the same problem with Internet Explorer. Having briefly glanced at the CSS spec, this is what I found:

For HTML documents… we recommend that authors specify the background for the BODY element rather than the HTML element. User agents should observe the following precedence rules to fill in the background: if the value of the ‘background’ property for the HTML element is different from ‘transparent’ then use it, else use the value of the ‘background’ property for the BODY element. If the resulting value is ‘transparent’, the rendering is undefined.

What appears to be the problem is that Windows lets the browser do the heavy lifting as far as selecting text goes, and the browser is just following the specification–applying the rules for which background colour to use, correctly, and then varying how selections of chunks of text appear based on that rather than on the actual colour of the text’s background, no matter how it’s created. OS X on the other hand is determining the background colour somehow and varying the how the selection appears based on that. I’m not totally sure this theory’s right, but it would account for the Firefox discrepancy between Windows and OS X…