FN-FORUM: White text, black background

date posted 7th March 2008 10:08

Hello all

I've been lurking on this forum for a while, but I suspect this is my
first post. I spent far too long thinking about becoming a
freelancer, but I've finally taken the plunge!

I'll introduce myself properly when I don't have such a big deadline
looming, but I have a two-part question I wonder if anyone could help
with...

I'm in the middle of building a (Joomla) site, which - whilst it
probably won't win any accessibility awards! - is predominantly white
text on a black background.

1) I'm tearing my hair out trying to do the links within content.
It's not a technical issue - my CSS is more than adequate - it's a
question of styling and usability. I've tried underlined links, no
underline on hover. I've tried having a white block background with
black text on hover. If this isn't problematic enough, the big issue
is how I deal with visited links; I've tried setting them to #ccc, but
it doesn't work well. Any ideas of a scheme for these? Maybe I
should just make text, say, #ddd and have links in white? The other
dominant colour in my design is a dark green, but I'm reluctant to
start using green links...

2) What's a sure fire way of ensuring that my text remains white on
black within an HTML email? I currently have CSS in the body to deal
with the likes of Gmail, inline CSS styles within my table cells
(spits), and so on. Should I use span tags? Do I realy have to use
font tags with the color attribute set? I've received too many
white-on-black emails lately that my Gmail client simply won't render,
so this is obviously a tricky issue...

Any help would be much appreciated.

Lukas