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What do you do when the World Wide Web Consortium has some confusing specifications, all browsers seem to ignore it, and a lot of people don't quite take the issue into consideration when they design sites? That's right, you write about it in your weblog, as all good samaritans do. Or something.

After having told at least two dozen people about how their form fields were lacking a color: specification, I was starting to have an urge to write about the situation. Then, I posted a comment on Jacques Distler's blog and pointed out how he, too, had (note: had!) no text color specified either, only a background color. This eventually led to me checking the %W3C%'s %CSS% Specification on it all. Turns out, the Specifications are what's causing the mess!

If we look at the color property, we find that: a) it inherits normally, and b) it applies to all elements. Now, are we designers to make sense out of that? It's not so hard, is it? Right? I would say that if something applies to all elements, and it also inherits, it also inherits for all elements. But this is not what I'm seeing here. No, not at all even.

I've put together three simple test cases to illustrate this. Currently, in Internet Explorer and Mozilla (and all other browsers that I recall, but cannot test with right now) the color: values don't exactly get inherited by form fields. So I raise the question: who is to blame?

Is it the W3C for not being clear in their specification? In all fairness, they could've added one single line to the section on color, explaining which elements it inherits to and, if any, which not. As it is, they leave it open to your interpretation, but as we all know by now, people interpret things quite differently from one another. Moreover, a Specification really should be clear about such things; after all, the specification is what people have to use when they write applications that make use of it.

On the other hand, should we perhaps blame the browser makers? In any case, it seems they chose not to interpret that part of the Specification at all and simply ignore it, leaving it up to us, the designers of websites, to handle the case. But is that acceptable? What if suddenly they all start to ignore other parts of the specifications, because "they're kind of vaguely documented"?

Perhaps if I have the time for it, I'll go round and inquire at the W3C and all browser makers about this, why they chose to do or say what they've done or said. But in the meantime, I'll let people sit on this topic for a while and, if they care to, scour the CSS Specifications to possibly prove that I missed something. If anyone has an answer, I would love to hear it.

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