a UI rant

[cellio]

(I posted this rant on the company wiki, on the aptly-named "rants" page, but I'm going to share it with a wider audience.)

HTML has been in common use for more than a decade. The field of UI design has been around for several more. Surely, somewhere in there, most people got the clue that when displaying text, you specify both or neither of text color and background color (with strong arguments for "neither" to give the user some control).

I was a little surprised to find that Sun does not have this clue, until I switched my environment to a reverse-video scheme and then looked at some Javadoc. Tan text on white background -- goody! -- because the HTML sets BGCOLOR=white and is silent on text color. But wait, it gets better -- they also do it for table cells and rows! Now I have to maintain a local style sheet with these three changes, and re-copy it into the output directory every time I geenrate Javadoc, because Sun decided to set half of this pair while fetching the other half from the OS.

There's no excuse for anyone to be making this egregious error in 2006.

Comments

[astroprisoner.livejournal.com]

That is astoundingly stupid of them.

[cellio]

Yeah.

I realized after posting this that I can make it less annoying by writing a new ant target that wraps the javadoc build and then copies the stylesheet (so I can get local builds that I can read without screwing up the official build). But darn it, I shouldn't have to...

I wonder how easy this is to fix in a custom doclet. (We already have a custom doclet, but I haven't studied the code lately.)

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

I have never looked into it, but I would assume that whatever process creates the JavaDoc pages works off of a set of templated fragments -- in which case it could be as easy as finding and modifying the fragments. That technique has worked wonderfully for me in many applications so far. The catch being, of course, that you have to find those fragments...

[xthlcm.livejournal.com]

You might also use greasemonkey + firefox to overlay your style changes whenever you view the javadocs.

[cellio]

Thanks. I'm not normally a Firefox user (though I have it installed), so any specific guidance you can offer would be much appreciated. Someone pointed me at the readeasily extension, which he said lets you impose your settings on a page-by-page basis, but it appears the extension has been abandoned and my attempt to install it failed with a version complaint. (I think my Firefox version is too new.)

[jducoeur]

Oh, right -- I promised you a little research. Digging around, the CSS-controlling extension I mentioned before appears to be Stylish. I haven't played with it, so I can't speak firsthand to how well it works, but it seems potentially useful for you...

[cellio]

Thank you! That seems to be working well. Earlier I found another extension (name temporarily forgotten) that looked like it would do this, but it didn't work very well. It required that you use mouse gestures to indicate the part of the page to modify, which makes it fragile -- there was no way to just say "body', for instance, on a page that uses tables to subdivide. And I didn't even try a frames-based site. And it wasn't very consistent about applying styles to entire sites like it said it could. Fortunately, I then saw your comment. :-)

[sethg]

<sarcasm>Cluelessness? At Sun? How unusual!</sarcasm>

IIRC there's some flag you can pass to javadoc that will tell the engine "hey, this is the twenty-first century so it's OK to use CSS". But it's been over a year since I had to wrestle with javadoc, so I could be misremembering.

Hey...

[rurik-lebedov.livejournal.com]

cellio... I'm a friend of ealdthryth's here in Greenville and I had a question about Technical Writing. She said you may be the person to ask since you do it for a living. Could you shoot me an e-mail back at anoanar-at-yahoo.com so I can ask you a quick question. Thanks, Rurik