User talk:Intgr/template styling

White-on-black color schemes
Wikipedia currently only has black-on-white (black text on white backgrounds) themes, or "skins"; however, I know there are some people out there, such as me, who prefer white on black. I have created my own standard.css, which works well in some cases, but there are lots of templates that only override the background color to a light color, and assume that the text color will always be black. In such a situation, the template appears as white on a very light color, and is obviously unreadable. What's worse, they mostly use the style= HTML attribute, which makes it impossible to override in your own CSS. Does anyone have ideas where to bring up this question, or where to discuss possible solutions? Perhaps someone is even interested in starting up a wikiproject dedicated to fixing these templates? -- intgr 08:01, 10 January 2007 (UTC)


 * You can usually use the  qualifier to override the HTML style attribute. Also, Memory-Alpha (a Star Trek wiki hosted by Wikia) currently has a pretty nice conversion of Monobook to white on black. You can try copying it to your user css -> MemoryAlpha:MediaWiki:Monobook.css (although it won't work perfectly. as you say, in content here assuming light backgrounds or dark text that isn't forcibly overwritten). --Splarka (rant) 08:58, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
 * MemoryAlpha is CC-by-nc, so I think including that stylesheet on Wikipedia might be copyvio due to the incompatible licences. --ais523 09:10, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Actually the original monobook is under GPL (see the comments in the css file), so Memory Alpha's should also be. the wub "?!"  12:27, 10 January 2007 (UTC)


 * The problem is not styling MediaWiki, but the various Wikipedia templates. And the problem is not overriding elements, but simply constructing the CSS selectors – I've tried something like, which doesn't work at all. And even if it did work, it would be an appalling hack. Not to mention that all the templates are very inconsistent right now, and it would take kilobytes of CSS to override most existing templates on Wikipedia. The templates should be fixed to use class attributes instead, but I wouldn't want to do that before discussing it (and possible alternatives) with other people. (And of course it would require cooperation from administrators if the style= attributes were going to be removed in the first place)
 * And then there are all those editors who think they're cool when they have custom-colored backgrounds on their user pages. Bah! -- intgr 11:49, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Hmm... I remember a rather nice windows colour scheme I developed, but had to abandon becasue the button text in MS Access was hard-coded to black. Plus ca change (or whatever). Rich Farmbrough, 15:53 10 January 2007 (GMT).
 * I don't think there's any chance of getting every user page to display perfectly in every skin and every browser and every custom monobook.css (and that includes my own, which has a yellow background and doesn't display completely correctly in FireFox). This is because user pages are generally not required to follow many of the style and accesibility guidelines related to other pages. As for the templates, the main problem with putting each and every formatting rule through the class attribute is that it would require all of the style rules to be defined in the sitewide common.css which is only editable by admins, meaning that it would be difficult to make any sort of formatting edit to them easily without the help of admins. What might be possible would be to edit monobook.js to loop through all of the style attributes hardcoded into page elements and invert any colours mentioned. Tra (Talk) 20:24, 10 January 2007 (UTC)


 * A non-intrusive approach would be to use class attributes in addition to style attributes – so that users could override the classes in their personal stylesheets. Although I personally think that the various templates should use standardized colors/style instead. Where really necessary, one can obviously fall back to manually changing the style attribute, but this should be the exception rather than the rule. -- intgr 20:45, 10 January 2007 (UTC)


 * There should be no problem adding CSS classes to templates, as long as they don't conflict each other out. That said, such a move would take forever to do... Tito xd (?!?) 02:31, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Table cell templates documentation
Of course, preferring white-on-black is the worst form of heresy, but I certainly respect what you're accomplishing here. If you find any more table cell templates that fit, would you mind updating Template:Table cell templates? Thanks! –EdC 17:55, 24 January 2007 (UTC) … And yes, I stole that table from you; it was far more extensive than what was there before. Great work! –EdC 17:59, 24 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the support; will do that. :) -- intgr 19:31, 24 January 2007 (UTC)