Quick CSS tip: Declare your body background!
Nov 23 2005
I keep seeing this on sites that I visit, and this evening the latest culprit (Shopify, via Particletree) has prompted me to write about it.
ATTENTION, CSS DEVELOPERS! ALWAYS DECLARE A COLOUR FOR YOUR DOCUMENT’S BACKGROUND!!
In case you missed that, let me say it again. Always declare a colour on the <body> element in your stylesheet – because, if you don’t, then someone with a non-default background setting might see something a bit like this:
Yup, I have an orange background as my default. Why? So I don’t make the same stupid mistake…
body { background: #fff; }
That’s not too much to ask, is it?
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Comments
- Justin Palmer
- 1009 days ago
- Whoops, thanks for the slap in the face. But yellow? Surely pink would be more appropriate. ;-)
- #1
- Matthew Pennell
- 1009 days ago
- Har de har. You’ve got the same issue on your main site as well, by the way.
- #2
- Matthew Pennell
- 1008 days ago
- While it is true that there may be users who have changed their background colour to counteract a disability (although given that nobody ever leaves out the ‘color’ declaration in their CSS, a user’s preferences are never going to be fully respected unless they’ve used a user-defined stylesheet), your page background can also be affected by stuff like Windows Themes; I’ve often seen people with off-white pages because they’ve changed their theme without realising.
- #4
- Christian Montoya
- 1006 days ago
- So very true, there really is no reason not to declare a body background.
- #5
- jordan
- 1006 days ago
- I hate hate hate it when people don’t specify a background colour. I, too, use a different coloured background just to catch this, but I found that the orange grates on my eyes after a while. Just a few days ago I switched it to #3399bb instead, which is more of an aquamarine. Note that the colour can’t be written out in shorthand for some reason.
I can’t understand why people forget or ignore setting a background colour on their page. It’s not like it takes that much effort; it’s one line.
By the way, in Firefox there’s a checkbox to make a user’s custom styles always override a site’s CSS, so that argument doesn’t count for anything. - #6
- WD Milner
- 1006 days ago
- I have been on this campaign for months from the day I changed the default browser background to grey during some local testing anf forgot to change it back. Since then I have left it and it is just amazing to see the number of sites that have not set a default backgound colour but relied on people having the browser default to white. It isn’t little sites either, large corporate sites and ever a few web designers. I usually drop a note to the webmaster. I haven’t seen any change on the corporates yet but the web designers usually fix it pretty quick :-)
- #7
