Too Cool for Internet Explorer

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

HTML Colors and the Shadows of Gray


Do you remember of the old monochromatic times?

In another recently experienced situation, I feel like in a "back to the past" movie.

Let me show you how that feeling arises:

Working for the Enterprise, there is always a chosen hardware and of course a chosen development environment. I have already posted about customer's decision around being IE6 the standard browser to be considered when developing applications in the previous post.

Considering the hardware, I have recently involved in a situation where the chosen hardware simply didn't support the chosen software options.

We have basically two models of PCs coming from a big enterprise supplier. One of them have an on board video controller (let's call it the X320 model), and the other an off board more specialized video controller (this one could be the X330 model).

Our principal customer site consists mainly of shades of red and gray, but the problem appears more easily with a variety of different tones of gray.



The question is: using the customer's standard CSS plenty of gray tones, many of those tones are simply ignored by X320's video controller, but appear fine when using the X330's one.

This situation brings me back to the old "safe web color" time, and proves me that in the "safe way"; there are no many safe gray options.



If you have any question or need more information, I have compiled information about HTML Colors in general and specifically about gray scale here.

The final word is "Be careful about Gray Shades".