There is no justification for light colored text on white backgrounds. All it does its make life difficult for people who already have enough trouble seeing.
FWIW I’m interested in this as I have implemented a couple of different versions of the same basic concept. Though not quite as elaborate in handling dependencies.
Reg
It might help if you included a reference or link to what you’re talking about…
Look at the website. The heading for my post is black. My post text is not. What is the benefit of light colored text for my post?
Nice! I didn’t realize there is a dark theme. Switched.
What website are you talking about?
Well, @rhb is right to some extent. The text color is #222 which is a really dark gray and not black. However, I think this might just be the Discourse default, so it’s better to report this issue upstream.
Turns out that the MATE theme configuration I was using (Nimbus) apparently got stepped on at some point without my noticing it. I’m still trying to find out how to control the fonts so that there are no light colored fonts. Just maximum contrast and say 3/4 of maximum contrast.
I’m using OpenIndiana Hipster which has had some QC issues with the releases.
A few months ago I started encountering text entry box labels on forms in the lightest shades the monitor is capable of to the point even when I was looking for the boxes I couldn’t see them. Maps are so pale that I cannot see the streets at all. Truly maddening.
I managed to get a larger cursor using the MATE cursor and could adjust the size. Now I can’t adjust the size. Very weird and annoying.
But thanks for the suggestions to go look at the theme as that did fix some of it, just not all. I need to look for the file that configures the theme. The contents of my home directory has become littered with files and directories that begin with “.” and I no longer have any idea where most of them came from and which ones are used. An amazing amount of cruft has appeared over the last 8-10 years.
Reg
This is an example of what I started seeing pervasively some months ago. Notice how pale the “March 6” under your name is? I’ve actually encountered worse.
I used to override the website fonts to prevent such nonsense. But it seems that Firefox and MATE don’t agree, so fixing one problem causes a different problem.
Sigh…
Cole Mickens via NixOS Discourse nixos1@discoursemail.com
writes:
Similarly, the dark theme is also fairly high contrast, in my
view.screenshot-1615030233
Excuse me, there is a dark theme? TIL, thanks!
This is what prompted my post.
Is there a manual in PDF format. I have a 1 TB 12.9" iPad Pro which is proving to be an excellent way to manage documentation in PDF format.
I bought it for a music reader, but still haven’t scanned the sheet music as I have to trim the pages to fit the scanner 
BTW I’m using OpenIndiana Hipster which is a Solaris derivative. So “some assembly required”.
I’m quite interested in the NixOS concepts. I had a job for several years supporting 1.25 million lines of very buggy code at an oil company. So I implemented a system that allowed me to control which program binary a particular user got. It was not uncommon that I had two simultaneous bug fixes to do and I didn’t want the first user to get the version for the 2nd user until the 2nd user had verified it was fixed. I wanted to give each user a few days to test things before I rolled them out more widely.
When I did complete system builds I put the loudest users in a list and they got all the new versions. If no one complained after a week or two I made that version the general use version.
There were about 400,000 lines that one guy had written by copy, paste and modify. The sole comment was his name. There was lots of code which belonged in a common library, but was not. So I had to search for the same bugs but with different names.
I wrote a program that looked for semantic patterns independent of the variable and function names. Found myself in a conversation with Brenda Baker of Bell Labs who informed me that she had a patent on what I was doing
Discourse is open source, what exactly is stopping us from applying patches to make this instance more accessible to people?
We use an instance hosted by the Discourse company.
My problem with the manuals is that they apply a lighter font weight to all text, via font-weight: 300. Setting this back to the default 400 with Stylus or your favourite user style manager makes the manual a lot more readable. I’m still hoping for the ability to enforce a minimum font weight in the browser one day…
I should greatly appreciate a more detailed explanation. I’m an old man who did battle with X11R4 and Motif 1.2 30+ years ago. I’m a scientist who happens to be good enough at computing that many of my peers call me a “programmer” much to my annoyance.
A friend who is a CS security geek and shares my passion for electronics mentioned NixOS to me.
I am quite interested in porting this to Illumos/OpenIndiana and FreeBSD. In my view it is the single most important problem in computer science.
Reg
