SOFTWARE: Awful Page Colours

My site is green. Not eco-green, but a few different shades of green. I like it. Others might hate my screen choices. I know there are SOME places, like SciFi Chick who's colour choices of black on dark grey baffle me completely.

There IS a solution for the failure of web page designers to consider the delicate colour palette of their reader. It's a bookmarklet. There is one that I call ZAP, and it removes all colour info from the page you are currently looking at. You basically end up with black type on a white background. Links are blue on my screen, but different settings in your browser might lead to different results.

At any rate, here's how you go about having ZAP on your system. Start up a new bookmark. Use Zap for the name. Then, in the URL, paste the following into the field:

javascript:(function(){var newSS, styles='* { background: white ! important; color: black !important } :link, :link * { color: #0000EE !important } :visited, :visited * { color: #551A8B !important }'; if(document.createStyleSheet) { document.createStyleSheet(%22javascript:'%22+styles+%22'%22); } else { newSS=document.createElement('link'); newSS.rel='stylesheet'; newSS.href='data:text/css,'+escape(styles); document.documentElement.childNodes[0].appendChild(newSS); } })();

It's important to get the whole thing into that one line. Then save the bookmark. I keep this bookmark on my Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox for easy access. Of course, you have to have javascript enabled and I can't and won't guarantee it works with Internet Explorer (I figure if you are using IE, you're probably beyond help anyway).

I originally found ZAP at Jesse's Bookmarklets site. I originally ran across the whole idea of bookmarklets at, no surprise, bookmarklets.com.

Some, or even many, of the bookmarklets are no longer necessary in Firefox. Firefox add-ins now do most of the work those bookmarklets did. Still, I haven't found anything that works as well or as quick in doing the assigned task as ZAP.

So, if you don't like green on green, then ZAP away!