backgrounds with CSS. And why its a bad idea.
TappedOut forum
Posted on Nov. 18, 2015, 9:47 p.m. by Nixin72
configuring backgrounds with CSS is a horrible idea. Please don't do it.
Backgrounds can look good. But not when you pick your favorite card art or your background is covered in flames or a big dragon or something. They look bad, it makes things hard to see- especially when you make text boxes opaque- thats the worst thing in the world- and you need to stop. When people are on mobile, it causes pages to run incredibly slowly and in addition to that it simply makes your pages crash entirely. This means that I will not look at a deck with a background image. I simply ditch it and forget about it, because I don't want to strain my eye, drain my battery or waste way too much bandwidth or data just for the background to download. They are becoming increasingly popular, but this needs stop.
I absolutely hate backgrounds, but I know not everybody does. Tell me what you think, because I want to know what arguments you have to support them. But there's plenty of ways that you can show off cool CSS without making a background image.
I agree. Pictures in the deck description are great, but a giant fucking rainbow dragon across the whole page makes it hard to read. Same goes for profile pages.
November 18, 2015 10:17 p.m. Edited.
Not just that but it causes pages to crash and it drains battery. They're obstructive and distracting and it takes away for being able to focus on a deck list. There's so few people who format the images properly- in small file types, so there's less to load, format it so that it's an not a solid background (it's slightly more opaque so that there's a greater contrast between background and text) and give proper contrasting colours between text and backgrounds and format it so that don't appear on mobile at all. There's even a setting to disable script, but it doesn't work.
FAMOUSWATERMELON- What are your thoughts on it? You seem sick of seeing a thread like this. I wasn't aware that there were others.
November 18, 2015 10:24 p.m.
FAMOUSWATERMELON says... #5
I mean, this basically happens every time someone messes up a background, plus like once a month, so...
I think that CSS is fine as long as it doesn't mess up the site itself, that it's not obscenely flashy, and that it's restricted to user pages. Other users will probably have different opinions, but I doubt that any change is made unless yeago has a change of heart or the site is attacked again.
November 18, 2015 10:31 p.m.
Epochalyptik says... #6
They genuinely piss me off, but I can tolerate them on decks (not that I look at decks anymore) and user pages. The fact that they can still be implemented through comments is, in my opinion, a massive flaw in our current system.
I'd rather they not be implemented at all. Anywhere. I've been for a while now a proponent of custom-built theme support that would allow upgraded users to upload images to use as backgrounds (basic users might be able to choose from one of 1-3 basic themes). Take the CSS away from the users because frankly many are neither qualified nor discerning enough to use it sensibly.
November 18, 2015 10:54 p.m.
VampireArmy says... #7
I will say one thing: if your deck or profile makes my eyes strain even a little, i click away immediately. I'm not going to strain my eyes to read light blue text on a bright red background. If you like that sort of thing, cool but your views will suffer for it
November 18, 2015 11:10 p.m.
FancyTuesday says... #8
Backgrounds with CSS is actually a very good idea. It's what CSS is designed to handle, and is a much better at the job than forcing z-indexed images on to a page with HTML. But I get the impression that we aren't talking web development standards here.
It's all down to taste. You hate backgrounds, other's don't. Personally, I dislike bad design, which I do see a lot of in edited pages, but it's not as simple as saying "background images are bad." There are principles to layout and design that some people are oblivious to, but if they think it looks cool who am I to tell them no when I can just not return to that page? You aren't obligated to look at those pages and you are well within your rights to close it and move on.
As to bandwidth and system taxing, that's not really an issue even on the most primitive devices and noisy pages. I think I've seen exactly one page where it may have caused a bandwidth issue because they were using a 5mb background, which pretty much quintuples the page size. Again, a bad design choice. For the past week my real phone has been bricked and I've been using a $20 ZTE POS with the RAM of a goldfish and I can view even the ugliest of the ugly pages. 9 out of 10 viewing errors and crashes are caused by stock browsers being very bad at their jobs, a software problem not a hardware shortcoming.
Can images still be red-pilled out of comments? I thought that was branded a bug and fixed. It's not something I ever do so I don't know it's happening unless I refresh the front page and see it. Completely agree that comments should be rendered as plain-text outside of markdown.
November 18, 2015 11:12 p.m. Edited.
Epochalyptik says... #9
See, I'd rather we just not give unqualified coders (this community is notorious for copying and implementing HTML/CSS without even knowing how the code works and barely knowing what it does) the capability to implement code.
I think if we had a real theme system with set objects that could be modified and set ways in which to modify them (e.g., image upload field, hex color picker, etc. rather than a code field), we'd end up with a much cleaner, much safer final product. And user customization wouldn't rely on breaking existing site elements in what you're forced to hope is an unintrusive manner.
November 18, 2015 11:21 p.m.
this particular issue is in the queue and for now the resolution is to extend the disable_scripts option in the settings to also strip these as well. its a bug.
November 18, 2015 11:21 p.m.
Epochalyptik says... #11
Also, "RAM of a goldfish" is my favorite comment of the month. Congratulations.
November 18, 2015 11:22 p.m.
Okay- my original post was a slight frustrated rant because I'd just encountered a particularly bad background that caused the page to crash several time before I was able to exit it.
Simple gradient backgrounds or solid colours, that I have no problem with. If you'd like to do a dega themed gradient background on a mardu, that'd probably be pretty cool. But maybe I'm complaining about the idea of background images (period.) as opposed to the people who don't know what they are doing in terms of using backgrounds or who have code given to them and they don't know how to work it. or maybe I've encountered an absurdly large amount of people who have used images that are way larger than they should be, or maybe iPhones just suck, or maybe I'm just being incredibly picky because I'm learning web development, media and design in college. Any or all of those could be contributing factors to my hatred of them.
Regardless, when done poorly (I'll specify that this time), they can become quite obnoxious to stumble across. They can make looking at any given page a very undesirable experience and certainly don't attract my attention when looking at them. I apologize if my original comment was a little bit more angry than I'd intended. As I said, I posted it right after encountering a particularly bad background image.
November 18, 2015 11:27 p.m.
FancyTuesday I was busy writing my comment, but I'm with epoch on that one, I've gotta use that sometime in my hardware and OS class XD it's so good
November 18, 2015 11:29 p.m.
Having customizable setting, as epoch said, would be cool. Being able to change easy things, like fonts and backgrounds. But there's so many people that just ask other users for their code and then accidentally screw up one thing and mess the whole thing up. Especially people who aren't using HTML 5 or CSS3 standards and have a lot more, much more confusing code, that they're working with.
November 18, 2015 11:33 p.m.
However, for people who do want to do the code manually, how do you allow a qualified person to add code while preventing someone who doesn't know how to properly? You either have to give everyone access to the ability to code, or no one has it.
November 18, 2015 11:35 p.m.
FancyTuesday says... #17
@ Epochalyptik & Nixin72: My phone brings so much joy to the world. You should see how many people laugh at it at work.
I like the idea of a UI that helps everyone customize their pages as a means of keeping people away from code as much as possible, but I've been over my ideal solution already in the other thread. It would be a lot of work to give such a system anywhere near the level of control we enjoy now, and if yeaGO were a magic code genie I'd probably ask for something more interesting.
November 18, 2015 11:50 p.m. Edited.
speaking of interesting, as a programmer, one of the least interesting is publishing and/or design-layer interfaces/solutions/disasters.
i think its cool. people get to try out fledgling web technologies which are, after all, what they are meant to be used for. human expression across an internet. and blink tags.
November 18, 2015 11:55 p.m.
Wouldn't the idea though be to give users a little less control? If we move into a UI that people used for customization instead of going right down to the code, people who know how to program would be losing a lot of control already. The idea would be to give more control to users who don't know how to do it so that everyone, including the users who would be losing some degree of freedom, would be able to ultimately have a better experience on the site.
November 18, 2015 11:57 p.m.
i'm not exactly sure why anyone has to lose freedom in the game, but lots of features are planned and everything is always changing. yes on all fronts.
November 19, 2015 12:07 a.m.
FancyTuesday says... #21
@yeaGO: Blinking text just isn't doing its job unless it's in a marquee, preferably if it's telling me to go to the next page in a webring.
@Nixin72: That would be your idea, not mine. I was speaking of my ideal solution that would compromise none of our customization options while giving less code-savvy users the tools to manipulate their pages a bit, because as I see it the problem is not ugly pages but rather bad coding being done by the unpracticed and unwilling to learn. I'm all for ugly pages, like VampireArmy and others have said just vote with your eyes and stay away.
November 19, 2015 12:09 a.m. Edited.
@ Nixin72
Have a list of functions/tags that don't work on each page of the website unless the account belongs to a certain user group.
Every time a tappedout.net page would save the server checks it for certain coding elements. If none of these extra elements are present the page is saved in it's newly edited state in the server. If extra elements are present proceed to the next step.
Server checks if user belongs to security group "CSS Qualified" and if so saves the webpage in it's newly edited state. If not the user's page is not edited but an error message appears near the top.
Once it's set up this is a seamless thing for people who aren't trying to do anything extra and if somebody who is not qualified makes an attempt then they see the Error message. The only wierd part is what is the system for determining if a user is qualified?
The only possible way to design a system that doesn't require an Administrator to manually enter people into security groups is to set up "tests". Because people can cheat on these tests some measures will need to be taken to prevent it. Namely a test with the following:
- A large number of tasks being chosen at random for people to complete.
- For each task there needs to be a variation of that task.
- An automatic grading system for the test. If users code is not 100% match to the code the server has marked as "accurate" for each question then you fail.
I know this seems like a pain to users who are very affluent in coding but the other options are:
- Coding is taken away from everyone (Easiest for Admins)
- Coding is available for everyone (Worst for Admins)
- Users must submit their own work for admin approval (Very painful for Admins)
- Users must submit certificates for administrative review (Some users buy books but never take tests... the tests can be expensive.)
November 19, 2015 12:15 a.m.
JakeHarlow says... #23
Creativity is all well and good, but the increased loading times that are often caused make me frown.
November 19, 2015 3:34 a.m.
slovakattack says... #24
I will say that certain members of this website have put a TON of effort into making sure my eyes bleed whenever I'm forced to visit their profile page.
November 19, 2015 10:21 a.m.
tappedout is the real myspace 2.0. sorry justin timberlake.
FAMOUSWATERMELON says... #2
And here we go again.
November 18, 2015 10:04 p.m.