Thread:Sakaros/@comment-1998339-20180724010707/@comment-1998339-20190407185436

I apologize in advance for the long rebuttal! (: SavageOpress1138 wrote: ...it’s kind of UX 101 that for big background spaces a softer color than white should be used... Respectfully, I disagree. Literally all meta wikis belonging to Wikia, Inc., the Wikimedia Foundation, Miraheze, & every other major wiki host use white page backgrounds on all pages&mdash;check them . The default MediaWiki software framework you can download to a private server comes equipped with white page backgrounds. Heck, my Confluence/MediaWiki project server at work has simple white page backgrounds. That's just wiki hosts. Peruse any online news source like, , or & you'll see white on big background spaces on every article you read.

Ye olde  is standard practice in development/design for a reason&mdash;it makes developers' lives easier when they don't have to adjust page elements or make the backgrounds of every associated image they want to add to a page transparent just to match a different color shade. Which leads me to my next point... SavageOpress1138 wrote: How badly does that mess up the templates? The current difficulties are two-fold, related to the blue coloration & the opacity. As far as the coloration is concerned, many of our legacy templates (like the Tabs template family I mentioned above) maintain vestigial remnants of white due to being created or imported during the white background period&mdash;take a look at my userpage or the latest WAs page to see those in action. Returning to white handles all those issues without the need to work through every template & fix the ugly white bits.

The second issue is the opacity. If I want to add an image to a template or a page that blends in with the page background&mdash;like, say, a WAs logo&mdash;I can't just open the browser console, find the hex code of the page background, & color my image background accordingly&mdash;that results in this, wherein the difference in opacity is evident. I have to outright color to alpha & remove all background color to get the image background to be transparent. The results rarely look good. Standardizing everything to an opaque white helps a great deal in this respect.

For example, to make use of the new era template I was discussing, I'll have to color to alpha & remove the white backgrounds of the used to denote the respective continuities. I'll also have to adjust the little gradient that serves as the background of the tabs. The results will likely not look as good. It's not the end of the world since I've been doing image adjustments since I returned here, but it's certainly an encumbrance to easy importation of external templates & produces less than stellar results in my opinion.

Even if it's arguably ugly from an aesthetic point of view, I believe we stand more to gain from following Wookieepedia's white background precedent than not. Doing so allows us to benefit from upstream templates & images housed on Wookieepedia wikis more easily & handles legacy issues arising from color mismatches on our own wiki. I'm guessing that's why Wookieepedia has stuck with the white&mdash;we aren't the only ones with legacy templates that would stick out like sore thumbs if the background was changed.