h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Sporkulious Eglon raised (in the Syntax Error thread) the possibility of adding custom custom page background and link colours as a Gadget. Here's some examples http://www.h2g2.com/U99947 (Sporky's home) & http://www.h2g2.com/U116730 (Zax's home).

This area might be covered by the recently hinted at colour modifying GuideML tag

;^)#

Having checked the "recently hinted at colour modifying GuideML tag" related to FONT colours only & not page background colour.

As my comment on this subject - there's been a lot of adverse comment about the appearance on personal graphics in the new skins & the difficulty of making images look nice (anti-aliasing) in both skins. h2g2 have said (at http://www.h2g2.com/A355547 )
"Polyblobs
Different pictures can now be uploaded for the different skins, so pictures will work on all new designs. This doesn't affect Researchers much, but means that when we allow you to upload your own pictures, you'll be able to tailor them for all our skin designs."

Customised background colours would complicate, or even negate, this feature - maybe it would be better handled by a fixed list of background colours that could be fitted in to the Polyblob model.

There's also the problem of h2g2 setting default font colours for various parts of a page according to the skin it's being displayed in, the need for non standard background colours to be accomodated & the myriad problems of how those colours are interpreted/displayed on the plethora of monitors/screens etc - making it readable in all possible situations would probably be fairly tricky.

My take on this subject is best summarised as - this is more suited to the idea of custom or user designed skins - would anyone care to start a "Suggest a Skin" page?

;^)#

It would be good if there was a thing whereby you could set a background colour to "contrast" so it may display white in classic, and black in alabaster, or something.

It strikes me that although popular, unless we can specify different page settings for different skins the dancing link colours will render most links unreadable in alabaster - they do on my alter ego's page. And if they're readable in alabaster, they won't work in goo...

It is downright near impossible for researcher pages to look good in both Skins... especially your's Bruce! Downright nasty!

Just doing my bit to encourage the use of the Goo, Spork

I had some other pages that looked equally ugly in both skins - but that's probably not the effect you were after

;^)#

But its kind of unfair trying to specifically encourage goo. It displays really, really badly on the monitors at uni, Alabaster works much better. The blue is always too dark, it leaches into the text making it hard to read. Black and white is a much better bet.

But now there are all these "page best viewed in goo" things, I can't cope

well, I think my page is easily viewed on any computer , even those running in 16 colours (sure, it is downright impossible to read in 2 colours)

lol I think 2 colours is impossible on any of these pages almost!

It doesn't work with the black writing on dark blue though I can't read most of the automatic stuff on your page

I'm really coming to hate this choice of skin thing.

I've hated it from the get go. You can read anything if you hit ctrl + A ... but believe you me, what you can't read in either skin doesn't need to be read, in either skin

>But its kind of unfair trying to specifically encourage goo

I was having a bit of a joke about that

;^)#

You were. But have you been here: http://www.h2g2.com/A357437

I have seen it - it does give a reasonable selection of "best in" buttons for both skins - it's basically a problem that will be inherent in user pages using graphics until h2g2 makes the facility to select different pics for each skin available to users.

In the meantime some indication of which skin a page was designed for is probably the best compromise

;^)#

*looks grudging *

I suppose so...
I hope there's a way of specifying different text colours, too, though, for each skin.

Jim Lynn said somewhere that there was a facility to specify font colours, that would display nicely in both skins, in the works somewhere.

;^)#

get a bigger monitor

I think they should just add gadgets like and so that the parser can include the enclosed stuff if that skin is used or ignore it if the other skin is used.