Another Operator

Installed Opera 7.50 to the 'D:Opera' directory on my USB flash drive, moved all the path references in opera6.ini to opera6def.ini, and then replaced all the 'D:Opera' references with '%CD%'. The %CD% part, on Windows 2000 and XP at least, expands to the current directory. (To test, open a command prompt window and type 'ECHO %CD%'; you should get back the current path. CD to a different drive/path and repeat it, and you should get back the new path.) This is necessary because the USB flash drive may be assigned any arbitrary drive letter as I move from machine to machine.

Was it successful? Almost.

Opera created a new directory named Opera\%CD% that contains the Mail and Profile directory trees. Flash drives are slow, so I turned off disk caching in Opera's preferences. Installing a new skin always creates a new path reference in opera6.ini that I delete after closing Opera (because I have a path reference for the skin in opera6def.ini).

I'll tinker with it a bit more as I have time. It does make a handy way to demo Opera to skeptical friends, and I don't have to put up with IE if I'm working temporarily at another computer.

After spending another couple hours editing and testing I've decided that using only system colors for the chat stylesheet is just too limiting. In order to get a suitable combination of colors, font styles, and font sizes that works in the Linux environment I had to use system colors that do not work well in the Windows environment.

A styleseet that works in both environments would have to be so simplified that you'd lose some of the useful distinctions between system messages, your own comments, regular window traffic, and alert lines (where someone else types your nickname). Already most folks say this stylsheet is ugly - a universal system-colors-only stylesheet would be even worse.

Of course, I can make no claim to any artistic sense or design abilities. Someone who has some art/design training may be able to make vast improvements and still use only system colors to achieve an attractive design that provides good differentiation among the various data types in the chat window, and does so across the range of operating systems that Opera supports.

Can you do better than I did?

Parts of Opera's user interface are presented as HTML or XML files styled using CSS. Two prominent examples are the message windows in the e-mail/newsreader/RSS client, and the chat window.

I find that black text on a white background is uncomfortable to read. I spend a lot of time in front of my monitor, and have set up most of the software I use a lot to display navy colored text on a pale green background.

Opera's default stylesheet for message and chat windows takes the black-on-white approach, with other colors used to indicate certain types of information. Since we can edit the CSS files that control the display of these windows, I can get color combinations that are more suited to my needs.

The way I've done this is to use the system colors that are specified in my Windows Control Panel, Display settings. Opera just uses whatever colors I have specified in the Windows system color scheme.

I used this page to help me determine which settings would be likely to work best: <http://jdcard.com/UserStyles.html>. The css file for my chat windows is at http://jdcard.com/Opera/im.css (screenshot showing how it looks on my system: <http://jdcard.com/Opera/ImCss.gif>), and the one for my message windows is http://jdcard/Opera/mime.css (screenshot using the Windows display theme called "Brick" <http://jdcard.com/Opera/MimeCss.gif>). You are welcome to use either or both of these css files if you think they are helpful.

Both files use only system-specified colors. The mime.css also formats the display with the message headers down the left side of the window rather than at the top, and displays many more of the message headers than does Opera's default version.

TECHNICAL NOTES
The greatest challenge in using system colors is the very restricted range of choices. Only the Window/WindowText/GrayText, ButtonFace/ButtonText, and InactiveCaption/InactiveCaptionText combinations provide adequate contrast and differentiation across the range of Windows 95 color schemes. Later versions of Windows offer more color schemes, which generally offer more flexibility than the limited Windows 95 set.

While it might seem that other combinations, such as InfoBackground/InfoText, could also be used, they don't have the differentiation required to be generally useful. Many of the color schemes have InfoBackground/InfoText set to the same colors as Window/WindowText.

One of the mistakes I made early in the process was to mix-and-match colors from different groups. For example, it might look good with my usual system color settings to use InactiveCaption as the background color with InfoText as the text color. But there is no reason to think that a user's system colors would necessarily maintain adequate contrast between those. It is only safe to use the values in their normal combinations. It is reasonable to assume that color schemes will consistently provide adequate contrast between ButtonFace and ButtonText, Window and WindowText, etc.

Given these limitations, it will often be necessary to use other tricks with your CSS to provide distinctions between data elements in your page. An example of this is the chat stylesheet, where I rely on border and font-size changes to convey distinctions among message types. Text-decoration and font-style may also be useful. However that also has its limitations: im.css also uses system fonts; I found that italic text was very hard to read with some of the Windows display schemes that use bitmapped fonts rather than TrueType fonts.