Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

I am constantly surprised at the number of websites out there that don’t bother to set a background-color on their pages. Why do I care? I don’t know. But it just seems to me that it’s a detail that every web designer should attend to.

You see, I like to be sure that I don’t forget to set the background color for my own sites. So, I’ve set my web browser’s default background color to a rather unattractive shade of light green. This way, I can immediately spot when I’ve forgotten it, and I can correct it right away. And, of course, it means that I also immediately spot it on other sites that I visit.

Let’s step back in time a bit — back to when the web was new, Netscape was a hot item, Internet Explorer was still trying to get its act together, and every page out there was displayed on a gray background. Then, Netscape introduced some new features which allowed web page authors to set the colors for their page background, text, and links. Colorful pages abounded! Nobody wanted to have that drab default gray anymore, so they all set their background colors to something different. (some using garish tiled background images to achieve nauseating effects). Eventually, a great number of sites settled on plain white as a background color, because it mimics the printed page, and gives the best contrast.

Now, step forward a few years, to somewhere between then and now. Internet Explorer 5.x is now on top of the heap in browser market share, Netscape 4 is all but dead, and Mozilla or Opera is the browser of choice for the web designer elite. Somewhere in there, the browser makers decided to make the default background color be white, rather than gray. This was a good thing, as now all of those pages that hadn’t been updated in years, or that had been authored by novices who didn’t know any better, or by techs who couldn’t be bothered with style, were much easier to read. But then some portion of the web designers (mostly the ones who were just coming into the game after this time, I’d guess) got lazy. If you want your page to be white, why bother setting it in your stylesheet? It’s already white in the browser, so we’ll just skip that. Even though all it would take to fix it is something like this in a stylesheet:

background-color: white;

Maybe I’m too picky. Maybe in the great overall scheme of things, it doesn’t matter. Maybe I should just set my browser’s default background color back to white and quit worrying about it. But I don’t think I will. I just want to know if the designers for the sites I visit are paying attention to the little details.