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Present - Programming - Pink Web

The Suddenly Pink Web

One fine winter day, I set up my computer to be optimized for nighttime Web surfing. I set the default colors in my browser for white-on-black text, for minimal light output. I figured I could simply quit forcing my colors on every page to switch to "day mode". What I discovered was that a surprising number of sites rely on the default colors of text and sometimes links to be unchanged.

Following are some screenshots to show how ugly the Web became as soon as I strayed from orthodox black text. Although I started with white text, I quickly changed to light pink to be able to at least see the presence of text on white backgrounds. These screenshots are all taken of Phoenix 0.5's rendering.

Here is the one that is certainly the best. It is an example of how sometimes, even the experts can go wrong:
[Nielsen Norman Group: Enhancing the user experience with pink on white]
I wrote an email to them about it; another oddity of their site was the lack of a Webmaster address. Apparently, they haven't done any of their usability studies on their own site. Another usability problem I ran into with one of the principal members' famous sites: since all links are text-based, there is no way to tell the difference between commercial "buy this report from me" links and links to other free columns of his--another delicious irony.

Here's the next best: a page that sets only a background color discussing usability:
[Mac OS X Aqua Human Interface Guidelines: Pink on White and worse]
Note also that I've changed the link colors to be brighter--cyan for unvisited, and sea green for visited. These pastels, which would be dubious on white, are nigh impossible to see in the light grey of the left frame. They're practically unreadable for me, with normal vision.

Another one of people who should really know better, as they do Web hosting:
[Rackspace: Pink on White or Light Grey]
It looks like they hand-rolled this monstrosity; the BODY tag only sets a BGCOLOR, and they rely on CSS for the rest. It would look even worse without style sheets.

Finally, not even my college can get it right, despite claiming to be one of the most wired campuses in the nation:
[Navy links with pink on white blurbs]
I guess spending tax dollars on laying 100BaseTX to every dorm room is more important than spending 10 more seconds on site design. Another, less obvious problem with this design is that fresh and visited links are set to the same color, providing no feedback on where one has been.

These are by no means all the guilty sites; at the time of writing, at least two major Web portals have this problem as well, although being covered in links and graphics, it's not immediately apparent. Interestingly, one of them (who once hosted this site, until a massive boycott due to their TOS) respects the user's colors, and renders as pink on black.

I'm not against allowing site designers to choose colors; I simply wish that they would finish the job. Can that really be so difficult?

Programming