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471 points OuterVale | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.537s | source
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sbarre ◴[] No.42062400[source]
I don't know if anyone else remembers this but in the late 90s, Microsoft had built-in CSS named colours that matched the Windows desktop theme/colours.

I have no idea if these still work (my IDE seems to say they do not, because everything is red).

    body {
      font-size : 11px ;
      color : windowtext ;
      background-color : appworkspace ;
    }
    a {
      color: menutext;
    }
    .headerBar {
      border-top    : 1px solid threedlightshadow ;
      border-left   : 1px solid threedlightshadow ;
      border-bottom : 1px solid threedshadow ;
      border-right  : 1px solid threedshadow ;
      background-color : threedface ;
    }

So you could build web UIs that matched the user's Desktop look and feel. We did this for our browser-based Intranet applications in 1998, which made them look a bit more "native".
replies(1): >>42062503 #
1. sbarre ◴[] No.42062503[source]
I did a bit of digging and it seems this was generalized into CSS System Colours at some point:

https://drafts.csswg.org/css-color/#css-system-colors

And all these old colours were deprecated:

https://drafts.csswg.org/css-color/#deprecated-system-colors

replies(1): >>42087729 #
2. myfonj ◴[] No.42087729[source]
That's nice resource, especially the "Tests" part showing Firefox keeps them all supported and Safari dropping most of them.

I have explored system colours including deprecated ones with intention to try to tap them into some more pleasant scheme (dimming canvastext for bordrers through color-mix() for example) and was interested about the "palette" we could use without defining own colours. Made a comprehensive "sampler" to test them [1,2] and Results were quite sad, especially outside Firefox [3].

[1] Dark: https://codepen.io/myf/pen/KKbVpmN [2] Light: https://codepen.io/myf/pen/jOXWPGV [3] https://x.com/myfonj/status/1769512951705149840