[chriswarbo]

I find it hard to take advice from anyone who makes such strong claims, in such a provocative manner, whilst failing so utterly in their own demonstration: https://imagebin.ca/v/2eeSxQABPMX9

Apparently that's "legible" and "looks the same in all... browsers".

I certainly agree that BMFW has less contrast than the MFW; so little that it's difficult to read!

For comparison, here's how MFW looks: https://imagebin.ca/v/2eeVa5QksF6e

White text on a black background, exactly as I asked for when I configured Firefox. Content taking up my whole widescreen monitor, exactly as I asked for when I made the Firefox window that size.

The only thing BMFW seems to have correct is using sans-serif font; which I expect is because I unticked Firefox's "allow pages to override these fonts" option. Other than that, it looks like a me-too cargo-cult of MFW which completely misses the point.

Presumably the creators of BMFW are using, and only ever test anything with, a black-on-white style which is, let me guess, the browser's default? What would that make them, in their own (jokingly "quoted") words?

[Retr0spectrum]

I'm a fan of white-on-black too, but whatever setting/addon you are using to acheive that effect seems to be very broken. It's unfair to blame BMFW for a problem created by, and unique to, your specific configuration.

[recursive]

The setting isn't broken. It's not an add-on. It's BMFW's fault, and it's fair to blame it for this. BMFW sets a foreground color, and does not set a background color.

Here are the settings in stock Firefox. http://imgur.com/h4SmKYs

[K0nserv]

The author even addresses the fact that they didn't set the background on the site.

"I would've even made this site's background a nice #EEEEEE if I wasn't so focused on keeping declarations to a lean 7 fucking lines."

Also the whole site is satire which you seemed to have missed

[chriswarbo]

> The author even addresses the fact that they didn't set the background on the site.

So? JS template engines allow server-side rendering, to address the fact their pages are slow, and unusable without JS. JS libraries have polyfills, to address browsers implementing older JS versions. Drupal allows Varnish, to address how slow its rendering is. SVG graphics libraries have canvas fallbacks to address IE. Video players have MP4 and Webm versions to address fragmented codec support. And so on.

Does these things make the MFW argument wrong or moot? No, because a) they involve extra work to solve problems that wouldn't exist if people just made a motherfucking website, and b) because many devs don't even bother to implement these fixes even when they exist: case in point, BMFW's authors wrote about setting the background but didn't bother actually doing it, so their site is broken.

> Also the whole site is satire which you seemed to have missed

I get that it's "haha only serious", but it's self-defeating. If the premise were "I built a Web-scale Uber-for-toilets with isomorphic React" and the text were unreadable, that would add to the charm. If the premise were "Stop breaking your sites with junk" (which is the message of MFW) and the text were unreadable, that would be unfortunate and a bit ironic. Yet BMFW's premise is "MFW is right, but there's no excuse to leave out these things", and those things break sites. The site itself is a demonstration of why the only point it makes is wrong. It's funny, but in a "laughing at" rather than a "laughing with" kind of way.

[kirubakaran]

> the whole site is satire which you seemed to have missed

You seem to have missed it too :-)

> I have taken a lot of inspiration from … http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

[snowwrestler]

I don't get the point of those settings. You seem to prefer white-on-black text, but the "Only with High Contrast themes" override means that it will almost never apply.

I tried setting this in my Firefox and visited a bunch of sites. None of them showed me white text on black background, because almost every site sets both background and foreground color styles, which override the preference setting. In fact the only site that was affected was the BMFW.

So what is the point of that setting? If you actually prefer white on black, set it to "Always" and you'll always get it--even on the BMFW.

[chriswarbo]

> I don't get the point of those settings. You seem to prefer white-on-black text, but the "Only with High Contrast themes" override means that it will almost never apply.

The idea of defaults is to be default. I don't mind sites specifying the use of particular colours, and it's useful e.g. for syntax highlighting, for text above background images, for transparent images assuming a particular background colour (e.g. pre-rendered LaTeX images, like those on Wikipedia), etc.

The problem is setting either the foreground or the background, but not both.

> I tried setting this in my Firefox and visited a bunch of sites. None of them showed me white text on black background, because almost every site sets both background and foreground color styles, which override the preference setting. In fact the only site that was affected was the BMFW.

If only that were true. Many sites set either just the foreground colour, assuming the background will be white; or just the background, assuming the foreground will be black. I've emailed many sites about this over the years, ended up opening countless others in a separate browser with different settings, and just rage-quitted many more.

Last week I emailed ticketmaster.es about the black-on-black text in their registration form (amongst many other issues; their service is terrible, I recommend avoiding them if possible)

This is also the reason I stopped using Yahoo Mail back in 2007 when they switched off access to their old Web UI (with no option to use IMAP or POP without paying) http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6BhjMzysLTs/Rg1mh0pLjMI/AAAAAAAAAA...

I've even tried fixing pages with custom Javascript http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2015-10-01-web_colours.html with mixed success. I also have a key bound to `xcalib -invert -alter` so I can quickly invert my screen colours.

The MFW concludes with the following:

> What I'm saying is that all the problems we have with websites are ones we create ourselves. Websites aren't broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. You break them. You son-of-a-bitch.

In their attempts to be "better", BMFW's authors broke it. Sure, it can be argued that light-on-dark default colours are an edge case; that the authors say they were "going to" add a background colour but didn't; etc. and those are all perfectly reasonable arguments. But those are exactly the arguments MFW and BMFW are disagreeing with, only with "light-on-dark default colours" instead of "disabled Javascript" or "out-of-date Android browser" or "retina display", etc.; or with "background colour" instead of "server-side rendering", "error handler", "CDN", etc.

[snowwrestler]

So basically you reversed the defaults in order to make it easier to find sites with partial style declarations, so you can yell at them.

Seems like a big waste of time to me.

[chriswarbo]

> So basically you reversed the defaults in order to make it easier to find sites with partial style declarations, so you can yell at them.

Nope, it's only the especially egregious that get yelled at. In the case of ticketmaster.es, their purchase form looks like this with the default black-on-white colour settings https://imagebin.ca/v/2ekv8S6pbKls

It looks like they're forcing the foreground colour of native text input fields to be black, and the background of native drop-down lists to be white. I refuse to change my entire GTK+ theme (and hence, every application I use on a machine which I spend the majority of every day staring at) to an eye-straining black-on-white colour scheme just to make up for some Web devs going out of their way to break their own sites.

Plus, in the case of ticketmaster, their form handler mangled my input; their "change details" form didn't work; they provide no contact details other than accounts on social media sites which require signing up to; their entire "help" section is an "ask us a question" form which displays all submissions publically; and so on. Besides, it's not "yelling", it's bug reporting; they're free to ignore it.

[recursive]

It's not for everyone.

[snowwrestler]

"I messed up my browser's settings, and now I'm upset that my browser looks messed up."

[recursive]

> "I messed up my browser's settings" ...

Wrong. I changed my browser's settings to perfectly reasonable values. White text on a black background. Now I'm reasonably upset because my browser looks messed up.