Emrah BASKAYA wrote:

On Sat, 13 Aug 2005 03:59:46 +0300, Jasper Bryant-Greene
<jasper@bryant-greene.name> wrote:

Emrah BASKAYA wrote:
A new background-color value that tells us which color value to switch  to  when image is loaded:

To me this seems dangerously like mixing behavioural information in with  presentational information.


It is no more or less behavioral than element:hover.

And yet, I fail to see the danger in it other than providing an
accessibility solution. I hope you don't mind eloborating what the danger
is before dissmissing by saying 'it is dangerous'. Otherwise, from your
stance, I can assume you do not need any solution to this problem, or even
consider it not a problem as you do not produce an alternative. And from
your point of view, no solution seems possible, because images being
loaded or not will always stay 'dangerously' behavioural.

Websites that look better that can be made in shorter time and easily
allowing a design change and less work hours and *still* be accessible on
a number of occasions pose no threat to me.

Here's the info at hand:
*Transparent images saves you time, allows you to do flexible designs,
re-use existing assets on different part of the page or on another design,
reduce bandwith costs immensely.

*Image is a part of presentation.

*Images have to be loaded. Loading it is a behaviour that is optional.

*Images may not be loaded ->
    *Due to network failure
    *User has switched off images
    *User Agent with no image capability (e.g. still running on @media screen)

*Images always load with some latency, as they require seperate http
calls. So we have problem even if the user has turned on images due to ->
    *larger number of images used on page
    *slow connection

*We -have to- cover for the lack of images. I think we agree on this?

*Therefore we must use a contrasting bg-color with the text-color. No sane
person would say no to this.

*Then we cannot use transparent images, as it is pointless.

So what you're telling the accessibility aware web authors is->
*You can't use transparent images.
*For each little design change, work multiple times longer than the people
who use transparent images, if you want your design to look as good.
*Or make sites that are accessible but don't look as good as can be.
*Why use images anyway?

What many will do is:
*Simply start using multibit alpha images, not caring for accessibility.
The reason this hasn't yet taken off is because IE was not supporting
PNG's properly. But this is changing with IE7.

I really don't want to discuss anymore about why transparent images are
beneficial I won't try to prove that they are. We should have gotten past
that point. If you have any alternative solution that makes sense and is
more logical than this, please join the discussion. If you don't, simply
ignore this post, and I'm afraid this may be all I'm going to get in this

I disagree with the syntax of this, but not the idea.  The problem is "onimageload" suggests that this should be the color on ALL image loading.  Remember that CSS3 also has a method of adding foreground images in CSS, through the global 'content' property.  What you're suggesting sounds like it should only work with background-image (though it may be better to have it work with both; but this might be difficult).

Also, while we're discussing accessibility, wouldn't it be useful for CSS to have some kind of syntax that tells the browser if either the background-color or text-color is user-overridden, the opposing colors should be shifted to a 'negative' color?  As it is, changing text color or background color on any site is dangerous because the user may override one but not the other, leading to problems with accessibility and readability.


Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.