{"id":41983,"date":"2003-10-31T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2003-10-31T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2003\/10\/31\/why-highlighting-by-inverting-colors-is-a-bad-idea\/"},"modified":"2003-10-31T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2003-10-31T07:00:00","slug":"why-highlighting-by-inverting-colors-is-a-bad-idea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20031031-00\/?p=41983","title":{"rendered":"Why highlighting by inverting colors is a bad idea"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Often people will say, “Oh, we can highlight by inverting the color.” <\/p>\n

This may have worked great on two-color black-and-white displays, but in the world of 32-bit color this no longer is effective. <\/p>\n

Consider the following picture. See if you can guess which one is inverted. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
\n
 <\/div>\n<\/td>\n
\n
 <\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
One<\/td>\nTwo<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Answer: The one on the right is inverted. <\/p>\n

The background color is gray, #808080. The box labelled “two” is highlighted by inversion. The inverse of #808080 is #7F7F7F, which is practically the same color. <\/p>\n

Even if your eyes happen to be good enough to spot the difference, it’s still not a very obvious difference. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Often people will say, “Oh, we can highlight by inverting the color.” This may have worked great on two-color black-and-white displays, but in the world of 32-bit color this no longer is effective. Consider the following picture. See if you can guess which one is inverted.     One Two Answer: The one on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-41983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-code"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Often people will say, “Oh, we can highlight by inverting the color.” This may have worked great on two-color black-and-white displays, but in the world of 32-bit color this no longer is effective. Consider the following picture. See if you can guess which one is inverted.     One Two Answer: The one on the […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41983\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}