a limitation of the Konqueror?

Posted Feb 19, 2004 17:18 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

You can force Konqueror to use the colors you want: go to the stylesheets
area in settings, tell it to use the "accessibility stylesheet defined in
the Customize tab", then set your colors in the Customize tab.

Posted Feb 20, 2004 6:39 UTC (Fri) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

I was just going to point out what RFUNK said, for an in-browser method of
configuring color preferences.

However, for my purposes, that does seem to leave a bit to be desired. I
haven't tried the option in Mozilla to the point I know how it works, but I
don't see that it could fully satisfy my needs, either.

Here's the situation. In general, I prefer light text on dark (white on black,
by default), as you mention. However, I do NOT want that to mean that
areas colored differently on the original page as delivered by the server end
up all the SAME color (default white on black) as rendered my my browser.
If the served page has an area of red text, I want it to be red. If it has a red
background with X color text, I want the background to STILL be red,
preferably with the served text color, as long as said text color is then
readable, of course.

A good example of the desirability for such a complex ruleset would be the
cached pages offered by Google, which normally hilite search terms. If ALL
color is converted, it's far harder to see the search terms amongst all that text
(tho they do still get BOLDED, from my experience, unless that's been
turned off as well). More common examples would include LWN itself, with
the various parts of the page, and elements such as quotes, set off in their own
colors. (At least LWN allows customization, tho..)

The biggest problem I've found, isn't that authors set specific colors, tho that
may indeed be irritating. Rather, it's that all to often they set specific colors
ONLY for background or text, WRONGLY ASSUMING that every browser
has THE SAME default choices they do, thus making the text contrast
enough with the background with only one specifically set, as to be visible.
Of course, in addition to the ordinary color settings, there's also the issue of
pages where images are used to set the background color, when images may
be turned off in the user's browser.

In my experience, coping with complexity such as this, where I want SOME
colors changed but not ALL of them, is something a simple one-size-fits-all
preferences solution can't handle, no matter HOW good it might be
otherwise. Something else is needed.

For me, that "something else" has been personal proxies. Back on
MSWormOS, I used "The Proxomitron", and it was one of my worst missed
tools when I switched to Linux. I even contemplated attempting to run it in
WINE, or getting VMWare Express (no longer offered, last I checked) to run
it in. However, I eventually found Privoxy, and now run that. Save for The
Proxomitron's ability to use OpenSSL and etc. to filter secure pages, Privoxy,
with its pcre based regular expressions, is advanced enough to generally fill
my needs quite well. I've developed quite a selection of filtering rules
designed to take any text to dark and make it lighter, and any background to
light and make it darker, all the while still maintaining the center ground and
strong colors such as red, as they are. For quite some time, nearly every time
I ran into a page that didn't render to my satisfaction, I invested some time
into designing a filter that would "fix" it. That doesn't happen very often any
more, and when it does, I can usually tweak a current filter slightly and fix it.
Nearly all pages now render as desired transparently, converting colors to
something personally tolerable on the fly.

Duncan