Color Me Confused: My dear friend The Always Delightful Chrissy dropped a line to let me know that the color scheme of the new site just wasn’t quite right. There was not enough contrast in the links to find them easily. I also realized I needed more differentiation in color between the post area and the nav bar on the left.

So I started messing with the colors and I couldn’t stop. I ended up with the colors you now see. Don’t know if you’ll like them. Not sure I do. But I think things are a bit more readable now.

I’m pretty happy with the white background for the posting area. That’s where the new material goes and it pretty highly contrasted now. Un-visited links are highlighted in blue. The visited links are actually blue also, but they are so dark that they blend in with the normal black text. The effect of this, I hope, is that visited links will subtly blend in more with the normal text, under the assumption that if you have visited them, you already know about them so it’s less important that they stand out.

I’m less enthusiastic about the bright, light brown background color, but no matter what I did, I was unable to get a very strong contrast between the text in the nav bar, which is nearly all links and therefore not black, and my traditional blue or green background colors.

I’m learning a good deal about color in web pages. It turns out that there is a concept called a safe palette, which is a set of 216 colors (that are defined in hexadecimal format) and just about every web browser will display comparably, in theory. You can see all the colors and their hexadecimal values right here. (These are also sometimes referred to as non-dithered colors.) Actually the situation is worse - and by worse I mean more complicated - than that, as described in this very informative page. But I am loath to subject myself to further limitation.

So the problem I was having was that I did not use a strict color-safe palette for the old site. The downside to that was that it is possible that when some people with certain limited hardware tried to access it, they may have seen a fairly strange color scheme, certainly not what I intended. The upside was that I could make the scheme readable for most people. But all in all, it’s probably better to stick to the safe palette. So there you are.

I’ll be tweaking this for a while, I think. Also, please send in sugs and advice.