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.

[xthlcm.livejournal.com]

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

[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