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Discussion on: What is the color of a blank page?

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sabberworm profile image
Raphael Schweikert • Edited

I remember in the ’90s when most browsers’ background color was grey. IE was the only one that has a white browser background by default. Others followed suit.

In fact you can change the browser background color in Firefox in about:config by setting browser.display.background_color. I have set this to grey to check if I haven’t accidentally forgotten to add background:white to a page that should have a white background.

I remember when they wanted to fix the weird special-casing of the body tag (which is NOT the root element but can upwards-„inherit“ its color to the html element, which is root) in XHTML. Still today, pages sent with the correct XHTML mime type (application/xhtml+xml) will not show this behaviour. Setting a background on the body tag there won’t make it magically stretch to the canvas.
Sadly, true XHTML never saw any real adoption…

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Bastien Calou

That is super-interesting, thank you so much for this comment.
Would you be ok with me writing a small bonus article and quoting your comment ?
I think more people need to know about this grey background tip.
Very interesting details about xhtml too, thanks!

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Raphael Schweikert

Sure, by all means, bonus away…

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Reece Daniels

xhtml... wow, haven't seen a mention of that in a while

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rhymes

Netscape definitely had a grey "blank page":

netscape navigator

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Bastien Calou

Indeed, I'm currently writing about this! (not the main subject, but part of it)