Wot no body { background-color:white; } ?
Yesterday I had a good day at opentech which was good fun and met lots of intersting folk, but I missed an opportunity to ask a Yahoo Search bod - Jeremy Zawodny why their search site didn’t bother setting a background colour, so instead, I’m going to start what’s hopefully not a regular look at sites which fail…
All of the major brands on the web other than Amazon failed to do the most basic QA on their sites, and all of them suffer from developers who don’t really know the common pitfalls of designing. I don’t know why this is, but please sort it out, it really looks bad for your brand - go back to your style guides, and read the bit where it says white backgrounds…
Sun Jul 24 22:22:00 UTC+0100 2005
transparent is the new white. ;-)
Wed Jul 27 13:38:00 UTC+0100 2005
Given the number of page hits that these pages get, and considering most of them probably don’t set any other colors either (meaning that the only problem comes when you’re dealing with the graphics aspect), some of this may be a considered choice, rather than a mistake. My thought on this matter applies most to google, which pulls every whitespace, and every other not-completely-neccesary aspect of their HTML out: In that case, it seems likely that they are making the concious choice to save bandwidth. Every character counts when you’re dealing with thousands of hits per second.