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Comment by ghssds | Hacker News Reader

>Way back in the early '90s, Windows provided a color-scheme editor. Users could set up any color scheme they liked, and all properly-written apps would inherit it and work fine.

It was barely usable. Many developers used the colors of the default theme no matter what. Others used the Windows-supplied colors for the background color and maybe the main foreground color, then used fixed, non-customizable colors for everything else, making everything invisible or hard to see if you used anything but a white-ish background. Trying to use what we now call dark mode was a big no. At best you could replace the wallpaper by an all-black screen so you feel a little less irradiated by your crt.

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It is quite similar on the Web still: web browsers (at least Firefox) allow to set user CSS or change default colors, but some websites (the percentage would vary defending on the method used) do not play nicely with that.

Likewise on Unix-like systems: most things can be covered with GTK and Qt themes, but some GUI programs would use a different GUI toolkit, and occasional developers would assume a dark-on-light theme, setting fixed colors accordingly.

Even TUI color interfaces suffer from that: when programs use colors outside of the 16 (that are rather practical to configure) or tweak (e.g., dim, reverse/invert) those for a particular kind of theme.

An annoying thing is that in most those cases things would have been fine if the developers simply did not touch colors. Even the linked article would have been more legible if it had no CSS, with either the usual defaults or a sensibly configured web browser: now it has a text-to-background contrast ratio slightly below the minimum of 7 recommended by WCAG.

I’ve always firmly believed that the user should have ultimate control over the color, fonts, and overall design of the applications on his system. Not the developer. The developer should just be able to say “this is text” and the OS should respect the user’s chosen text color. The developer should be able to say “this is a window” and the system decides how it’s styled. Every new OS release and every new browser release, we drift farther away from that ideal. If we respected the user’s preferences, we’d have a consistently styled workspace, and all our tools would look and feel like they belonged together.

Handing all of this control over look and feel to developers was a major mistake, and we pay for it over and over by having tools we keep having to re-learn, that look and function slightly differently from each other.

Exactly. That's what made the Windows scheme editor so great.

I never had a problem building my applications in Visual Studio to respect the system color scheme.

A nice example are epub files. I've basically disable all publisher styles from my reader, especially for novels. Then you have that one file where it's all `div` in the html.

Yeah it's baffling that people see fit to override the user's text color, but then leave the background color up to chance; or vice versa. The result? Occasionally invisible text.

If you're going to set the colors of some elements, you have to set them all. It's not that hard a concept.

> Others used the Windows-supplied colors for the background color and maybe the main foreground color, then used fixed, non-customizable colors for everything else, making everything invisible or hard to see if you used anything but a white-ish background.

I blame the Developer UX.

In Visual Studio, objects might have defaulted to the system color scheme, but if you ever selected colors for your controls, the palette was a collection of hard-coded colors, not system color classes. The IDE gave no indication that by selecting a new color you were forgoing an accessible, system-derived hue, and the documentation I had at the time (Sam's teach yourself ____ in 24 hours) didn't give the kind of cookbook examples I would have needed to keep my own GUIs system-controlled.

I remember being able to change the color of every window frame, button, selector, scroll bars, and so on. For a time most people had their windows using bright colors with zero regards for good design, they just liked colors.

The same people still send emails and write documents with half a dozen differnet random font faces, colors, and sizes.

"Barely usable?" WHAT was? The scheme editor was perfectly usable, for well over a decade.

"Many developers used the colors of the default theme no matter what"

Which is what they were supposed to do, resulting in usable software that honored the user's preferences. And developers didn't have to dick around with color palettes. Win/win.

"Others used the Windows-supplied colors for the background color and maybe the main foreground color, then used fixed, non-customizable colors for everything else, making everything invisible or hard to see if you used anything but a white-ish background"

Yep, some did. And? If developers issue defective software, the OS should be degraded? What's your point here? Let's say developers somehow mess up sound reproduction: Should the OS no longer support audio playback?

PulseAudio sez hi

Exactly this. Everyone used the default, we never thought about it, and all software looked the same. As a result, everything was consistent, you knew at a glance what everything was, and you could start using it right away. I miss that era, I feel like we've regressed, not least because we no longer have those underlined keyboard shortcuts on every single UI element.

It worked quite well until skinz came in fashion, a self-inflicted issue.

Self-inflicted by who?

Developers who ignored proper color-palette practices.

In case you can’t see, VerifiedReports states:

“Developers who ignored proper color-palette practices.”

Agreed. Pls vouch for the comment.

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