If they're going to be doing such hackery, just style both at the same time. Use JavaScript or something to ensure both are styled. This really isn't the developer's concern.
> The author is using something that manipulates the style of inputs to make them dark with light fonts
The author is setting his system theme to a dark one. Maybe you don't know what that is because such options seem to be disappearing, but a system theme controls the styling of (ideally) all GUI applications running in the OS. One of these applications is the web browser.
> but only if the input isn't explicitly styled with either background-color or color
No, themes set both. It's the web developer that overrode one but not the other and what the author is complaining about.
> If they're going to be doing such hackery, just style both at the same time.
This is precisely what the author wishes of web developers and their hackery. You're directing this suggestion to the wrong person. The author did set both when setting his system theme.
> Use JavaScript or something to ensure both are styled. This really isn't the developer's concern.
Again, the author did style both when setting his system theme. It's the web developer that is overriding the style of one but not the other.
This sets the users desktop colors. Firefox will pick this up and use these colors for elements on the page unless these elements are explicitly styled by the developer.
So say the users theme specifies a grey or black background and white text. The developer wants a slightly different grey on the text but is ok with the default light background that developer assumes will show up.
Since the user specified a default color for the background and the developer did not we get a grey background. Since the developer selected a text color that takes precedence over the users selected color so we get grey text.
End result grey text on the grey background. There is no hackery. The user can't just style both because by design the developers choices are supposed to override defaults.
The user didn't do anything wrong. It is 100% the developers fault for explicitly specifying the color of the text and assuming (making an ass out of you and me) that the background would be a certain color because it is on their install of chrome. This is no different than assuming the users screen is a certain size. If you set the color of text just go ahead and actually specify the background color as well.
It's a calculated risk to address 99% of users who don't have their browser change their default agent styles. Everyone else is assumed to know what they're doing.
Overriding one value and not the other isn't doing the user a favor it predictably results in broken behavior that you could 100% avoid by designing your page competently. The 2 colors are implicitly related and need to be chosen together to result in a readable result.
The fact that it works okay on most systems does not indicate that your work is correct.
100% broken code per standards that happened to work under internet explorer 6 wasn't correct under the principle that people could just use ie.
This is only different in that this debate is more nonsensical because the correct behavior is so easy to achieve.
The default background being light isn't an actual default and if you depend on it then it is no different than depending on the user speaking English having 3 names text being ltr.
Its calculated nothing because setting the background color increases how predictable your look and feel is. There are zero downsides to doing so.
> just style both at the same time
That's exactly the point. The system by default sets both colors, though most browsers I've used allow the website to override the colors. In these cases, the websites only override one but not the other.
You're using the word "override"; what do you think the order of these things is? As far as I'm aware:
- The user sets their system's colours (e.g. for me that's white text and black background). These are used by all applications, including the browser.
- Web sites may override these defaults by providing CSS, e.g. Google dictionary forcing the text to be black
These bugs are caused by Facebook, Dropbox, Google, Twitter, etc. shipping broken overrides. It's a pretty minor problem (as this post's author acknowledges), but it's not the user's fault.
If these sites didn't try to override things, i.e. by providing plain, semantic HTML, then this problem wouldn't occur (some might prefer such sites!)
I agree, but I think this could be phrased better: If the system is using a (light-foreground-on-)dark-background theme, it should force web pages to use a dark-background theme, no matter what CSS they have.
> Though, that might be a problem for some users, especially those with a default dark theme on their systems.
It's a real issue, every time I set a dark theme, web pages become affected because the defaults get changed. I think the issue should be fixed by the browser vendor really. Eventually I get frustrated enough to just disable it altogether.
Yes, I agree. Or whoever built the dark theme. They should be checking whether inputs have been overrided with styles for both background/color or none.