Why color should be disabled ... - Page 3

[Dani]

I'm the opposite: it's more pale on my lappy than my desktop.

[Dani]

Assuming the two colors are meant to emphasize "good" vs "bad", it seems like red and green are the worst you could pick from a usability perspective, if you were to consider color blindness to be a possible issue. The colored text would still be distinguished, but only from the regular black text.

Taking this to heart, I did a search for [search]color blindness[/search] in wikipedia. It appears that there are multiple types of color blindness, each of which a person sees every color differently. On top of that, there isn't any color in the rainbow that appear the same for colorblind people as well as non-colorblind people. Therefore, it's impossible to put any significant amount of weight into picking colorblind-safe colors. I therefore defaulted back into the tried and true red and green, two primary colors that are often used both on the web as well as off.

[jbennet]

my best mate is colourblind

he knows what the colours are, its just if they are too similar he just cant tell e.g cant tell brown from dark red

[Dani]

I don't see how that would make red and green be bad choices then.

[jbennet]

exactly i say bring back the colours

[MidiMagic]

The "dark gray" in the post renders as blue on my browser.

[tgreer]

Code segments aside, color should not be necessary for clarity or emphasis. A well-constructed and properly punctuated post doesn't need a crutch. If you find yourself needing to add orange 16pt. bold-italic formatting to your post so it will make sense, then you likely need to revise your post.

[MidiMagic]

How do I turn off the color once I select it? There's no black.

I also do not like the fact that you limited the selection. I use different colors to indicate different parts of text for comment below.

[tgreer]

I use different colors to indicate different parts of text for comment below.

Use the "quote" bbcode, intended for just this purpose.

[Dani]

How do I turn off the color once I select it? There's no black.

I also do not like the fact that you limited the selection. I use different colors to indicate different parts of text for comment below.

There's no black because text, by default, is dark grey :) Use the "strip color" tag (the top left 'A' with the X through it).

[John A]

What a welcome surprise when I come back to DaniWeb after being absent for a couple of days.

My signature was destroyed. Instead of a slate-green color, it burns the eyes with a shocking red. I wouldn't have minded if it had been changed back to the default dark gray, but it is a little bit ridiculous to have something in my signature doing something that I have told others not to do.

The irony of this whole thing is that while Dani claims that colors are being abused, this change isn't going to fix anything. People can still use annoying color in their posts, and as long as they can do this, we will end up with annoying posts from people who see color as a novelty. Meanwhile, you're penalizing all those who actually used the colors correctly.

Myself, I don't use colors very often. However, I do like to have the choice of more than 2 colors which burn out my eyes when I'm emphasizing something. Especially when I'm highlighting code.

[Dani]

What colors do you recommend, taking into consideration that they need to stand out against black, cannot be a shade of purple (as that would clash with our site layout), and cannot be a shade of blue (as that is confusing with our links).

Regarding your signature being destroyed: I'm sorry about that. As mentioned in a previous post, I did take measures to ensure that older posts with different colors remained intact, unaffected. However, I didn't consider the fact that forum signatures might be affected because, for more than half a year now, color has not been allowed in forum signatures. (You were grandfathered in because you hadn't altered your signature in all that time).

[Dani]

Upon reflection, I stand by my decision in thinking that limiting users to red and blue was the right compromise - there are just as many people who want all colors as who want no colors, but I could have done with offering people more of a "heads up" or a longer period of discussing the issue, so I do apologize for that.

I'm serious though - for those of you who don't like red and green. If you had to pick your own two colors to highlight good or bad lines of code, and they couldn't be blue, purple, anything that isn't visible on a white background, or anything that can't easily be differentiated from black, what colors would you choose?

[Dani]

I went and changed the setting so if an invalid color is now specified, it defaults to green instead of red.

[John A]

What colors do you recommend, taking into consideration that they need to stand out against black, cannot be a shade of purple (as that would clash with our site layout), and cannot be a shade of blue (as that is confusing with our links).

I never used blue in regular text, however, I was a big fan of it when I was highlighting code. Like Narue mentioned previously, it's commonly used to show "good" code, whereas red is for "bad" code. And links are rarely used inside code tags, so it's hard to say that would break the design.

As far as regular text goes, I prefer colors such as slate, dark colors, and of course a light gray. I don't depend on all of them, but at least one of them which doesn't stand out like Bright Red would be nice.

Regarding your signature being destroyed: I'm sorry about that. As mentioned in a previous post, I did take measures to ensure that older posts with different colors remained intact, unaffected. However, I didn't consider the fact that forum signatures might be affected because, for more than half a year now, color has not been allowed in forum signatures. (You were grandfathered in because you hadn't altered your signature in all that time).

Not quite so sure about that. My latest signature I've only had for a few weeks. I'm aware of the fact that there wasn't color allowed for quite some time, but in the last few months color was re-enabled in the signature. Either that or there was some bug.

Speaking of bugs, how come the color palette still shows all the colors? Shouldn't you at least make people aware of their choices?

[Dani]

Programming is only a very small section of DaniWeb ... there's Windows/mac/linux technical support, and Internet marketing, and job offers, and a webmaster marketplace, etc. It's just not feasable to tell people "well you can select from these colors for code and these colors for non-code" ... So the colors that you allow you have to be prepared to allow whether in code or not. So while yes, links typically aren't going to appear in code, which is why they're one of the colors used to do syntax highlighting, it just isn't feasable to expect everyone to not use them outside of code if they're made available. Quite a few regular members come to mind who use blue for regular text.

As far as non-code colors, there really is no reason to use color. Color is here to assist in the comprehension of posts. Not using color in posts doesn't deter from their comprehension at all. You can emphasize your point just as well without it being in light grey ... it will just be a lot easier to read when not light grey :) If there's a particular word or phrase you want to emphasize, use bold. It's a whole lot less annoying to everyone who has a hard time reading multicolored text.

To quote tgreer, "A properly constructed, punctuated, grammatical sentence needs no additional formatting. No word in my above sentence needs to be bold-italic 15.5pt orange to make sense."

Moving on ...

> but in the last few months color was re-enabled in the signature
Actually, I had just forgotten to set the no color for sigs option for the Staff Writers usergroup, so when you were promoted to staff writer ... :) Even I haven't been able to add color to my signature in a very long time.

Also, not sure why you get the full color palette in the wysiwyg editor. What page is that on? You might be caching the JavaScript file.

['Stein]

Chalk up a vote for enabling color.

Correct color usage can greatly improve the clarity of a post, especially when one wants the post to appear simple. A good usage of color can often be found in the spyware section.

But again, does feedback even matter here anymore?

[John A]

Programming is only a very small section of DaniWeb ... there's Windows/mac/linux technical support, and Internet marketing, and job offers, and a webmaster marketplace, etc. It's just not feasable to tell people "well you can select from these colors for code and these colors for non-code"

Well, I would assume that your DaniWeb code would automatically disable the extra colors in the palette for non-code forums. But whatever.

... So the colors that you allow you have to be prepared to allow whether in code or not.

Can't your parser just change any blue that's not inside [code] tags into red or green?

As far as non-code colors, there really is no reason to use color. Color is here to assist in the comprehension of posts. Not using color in posts doesn't deter from their comprehension at all. You can emphasize your point just as well without it being in light grey ... it will just be a lot easier to read when not light grey

Ever consider a time when you want to de-emphasize something? Edit "tags" come to mind. I don't want them to be obtrusive to the reader, so they're colored gray. But it should still be possible to see where something was changed.

If there's a particular word or phrase you want to emphasize, use bold. It's a whole lot less annoying to everyone who has a hard time reading multicolored text.

Yes, but the people who actually use it to emphasize something don't "multicolor their posts". The irresponsible color taggers can still make their entire post bold red if they want. As long as that is still possible, we're never going to be rid of ugly posts. Guess what, if you have 40 colors, and you remove 38 of them, what is that person going to do? They're not going to stop using colors, they're going to use those 2 remaining colors!

Also, not sure why you get the full color palette in the wysiwyg editor. What page is that on? You might be caching the JavaScript file.

Must have been the cache. Now it's displaying properly, except for the fact that the danged thing drops so far down on the page! It's been this way ever since your site revamp.

[Dani]

Hi,

Of course feedback is important - and it's what I primarily go by. But whose feedback do I take?

Do I listen to tgreer who thinks it's absurd that people need to use color to express themselves?
Do I listen to Ancient Dragon who says that any type of color in peopole's posts is too distracting?
Do I listen to Infarction and iamthwee and ~s.o.s.~ who agree color isn't necessary?
Do I listen to Narue who only wants color to represent good and bad code lines?

... Or do I listen to you, KevinADC, Dave S, and The Dude who want a full selection of colors?

There's no way I could let everyone have their way. It's just the nature of the beast. Therefore, in this particular instance, I faced a situation where myself and some regular members didn't want color at all to the point of really finding it distracting and obnoxious. And then there were other regular members who wanted full use of color, but primarily just to point out particular lines in code (like Dave S and Narue).

Therefore, I thought that the best compromise would be to allow everyone to select from two colors, therefore eliminating the rainbow effect that is just oh so distracting, and emphasizing the fact that colors should only be used when necessary, and not the way teens use in IM conversations (which was the direction we were headed in by providing the full color palette).

[Dani]

I think I made a mistake in not making this a public poll, but to give you an example of what I'm up against and how hard it is to please everyone:

People who don't want color include myself, Ancient Dragon, Infarction, tgreer, and s.o.s..

People who wouldn't mind choosing among a limited selection of colors (which is what we ended up doing) include Duki, jbennet, Rashakil Fol, and Sulley's Boo.

All far more than the number of people who do want a full range of all color choices.

And yet of those who want a full range of color, the general concensus is that you only want to be able to use two or three different colors, you just don't like my color choices.

So how am I not listening to feedback?

[John A]

Of course feedback is important - and it's what I primarily go by. But whose feedback do I take?

Most importantly, you should listen to the people who don't want it to change, and who have been around here for a while. The people who want the change obviously like this place enough already, that's why they are here. But if you annoy enough old timers, you're running the risk of losing part of the most critical asset of a forum.

I agree with Dave Sinkula in the fact that there should be a beta.daniweb.com or something. Before the last major update of DaniWeb, the rounded corners never caused problems. Had you gotten some beta testers to give you feedback on their speed, you could have fixed it before releasing it to everyone. Plus, I like changes all neatly packaged, like a new release. It's the constant tweaking that annoys me.

Of course you aren't going to make everyone happy by not changing, but chances are people aren't going to quit just because you aren't changing something. And when you do decide to change anything somewhat-debatable, please open a discussion beforehand. I do have to thank you for doing so on this thread. I appreciate it, I really do.

[Aia]

So how am I not listening to feedback?

Why don't we let the poll show the results, and then use it as a form of democracy.
Instead of imposing our personal preference, let's just agree to let mayority rule and accept the result.

[Dani]

> let's just agree to let mayority rule and accept the result.
You can see from the poll that it's 11 to have no color or limited color and 7 to have full color. However, 18 people surely isn't an accurate sampling of 164,000 members.

[Dani]

Joeprogrammer,

Here's the scoop about the whole "not changing" thing ... I was never a fan of color and we never had color. Sometime last year, Dave Sinkula and some other members said that color was very important to them, and convinced me to enable it (not realizing what I was getting myself into). Ever since I did, I completely regretted it, but I stuck with it gritting my teeth with the promise from the mods who wanted color that they would make sure to strictly enforce not using color for no reason, etc.

However, that hasn't happened. People are using all sorts of color all over the place, there are lots of regular members just like me who find it absolutely irritating (the majority, according to this poll), and after really, really trying to go along with it for a complete year, I just have to say that I listened to other people, I tried it, it didn't work out for me, and so now I am trying to come up with a solution to make everyone happy (the compromise of limited colors that lets people highlight code and use color when it aids their post, but not have a full color picker that's reminiscent of an instant message chatting program). This was also a compromise in that Dave S's main criticism about getting ride of color completely is that people's posts are altered to the point of them no longer making sense. (For example, if a line of a code segment is colored and then he makes the comment "the colored line has a bug in it". My compromise finds a solution for that.)

My goal here was to force people to use color only as a tool to point good (green) and bad (red) things out, without color being thought of as a decorative font feature.

Anyways, the point I wanted to make in this post is it is not as if we've had color enabled for the past four years and suddenly I want to get rid of it. The truth is that we haven't had any color for three years, then I was convinced to give it a shot, I agreed to, I gave it a real chance for a full year, but my opinion of it has just gotten worse by the day. But I did try just for you guys!

[Dave Sinkula]

Nevermind. Disable color. Remove fonts, and sizes and fonts and colors [again] [[oh, my]].

Then get rid of smilies and indentation, and bulleted listings, and quotes, and code tags, and hyperlinks. And what not. Keep thinning the herd until you've gone too far. Then turn back. I'm leaving now.

[Dani]

*Sigh* :-/

But wait a minute, Dave. You just said the other day that you understood my point that some things on the site you'll love, and some you'll despise ... can't you at least appreciate the value in that more people were anti-color than were pro-color in the poll? Or that a compromise needed to be made? Or do the opinions of myself, tgreer, sos, and Ancient Dragon (who all don't want any color at all) not count as much as yours?

[Dani]

> Or do the opinions of ... not count as much as yours?
Can't fall sleep. :( Upon rereading what I wrote, this sentence was a little harsh. I'm going to try and sleep on this whole thread. It's nearly 4 am and it's things like this that keep me awake at nights :( *sigh* I really do want to do what's best for everyone. Honest I do.

[Serunson]

well to i doesn't bother me if it there or not

it would be nice yes, but then everyone would use it making all the posts so colourful that the difference isn't noticed. a gd addition would be red posts for really urgent queries/questions.

if it ain't broke don't fix it or change it

[~s.o.s~]

> Then turn back. I'm leaving now.
I am surprised Dave that an old timer like you, who must be definitely having his share of posts of forums which didn't even have code tags, be so attached to colors. I have seen the best of your posts not rely on some coloring to deliver its value, so I guess there is much more than it meets the eye.

> I really do want to do what's best for everyone. Honest I do.
I guess this is the price one must pay for being cooperative and trying to mingle, considering that I have seen forums run by Nazi admins who don't give a damn to anything.

[Rashakil Fol]

Nevermind. Disable color. Remove fonts, and sizes and fonts and colors [again] [[oh, my]].

Then get rid of smilies and indentation, and bulleted listings, and quotes, and code tags, and hyperlinks. And what not. Keep thinning the herd until you've gone too far. Then turn back. I'm leaving now.

A statement which comes from somebody who hasn't posted outside the coffee house in three months.