A couple hours I posted the announcement for C&I 9.3 (below), there was a comment on it on FriendFeed from Polly Potter, noting my suggestion that people not use white text on a dark background in their blogs. She noted that light gray text on a light background can also be difficult to read.
Which is true enough (and is one of my complaints about FriendFeed, actually: comments appear as light gray text), but I wondered if it was more pointed…
OK; after looking at it, I’ve changed the template so that block-quoted text (and some other odd varieties that don’t happen very often), instead of being color #777, a fairly light gray, are now color #222, a very dark gray (on my display, it’s indistinguishable from black).
Better or worse? Less elegant, I think, but more readable–a choice I’m willing to make.
Update: I played with it a little more. It’s now #333, which is distinguishably lighter than black on a good display, but still very high contrast. Now if FriendFeed would use something closer to black for comment text…
I didn’t mean the font on your site is hard to read – I was agreeing with your C&I 9.3 about eccentric choices in blog templates. I apologize for causing confusion.
I took it as a helpful suggestion, even if it wasn’t aimed at me. Thanks!
Walt, you should look in to the Stylish plugin for Firefox. I downloaded someone’s “Better FriendFeed” style which makes it more legible to me, though I don’t know that it changes the text color. But with Stylish, it would be easy enough to add another rule to take care of that.
There are several tools online for checking color contrast to see whether it meets a standard minimum. This one looks good:
http://www.snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html
I love the look of Storytlr (http://storytlr.com) and I may import friends FriendFeed feeds and dump FF entirely.
Wow, Steve Lawson, what a difference Stylish plus Cleaner Friendfeed make to font color. Thank you for the tip.
Steve, Thanks. I’ll look into that. (As it is, I use Firefox itself to say that I get to choose the typeface used–which is a BIG help, given my aversion to Arial/Helvetica.)
And the color-contrast site is a nice little device. According to it, #777 (=777777) is “sort of” compliant against a white background, which I think is right. #333 is a good solid contrast.
Here’s another example of one thing I noted in my “Shiny toys or useful tools?” talk and article: You really can’t predict when a blog post will (or won’t) draw comments–unless it’s about death, birth, divorce, marriage or a new job.
OK, I added the Firefox extension–and yes, it’s wonderful. THANKS!