quoting:
[[
@zcorpan
The default style for <mark> is mark { background: yellow; color: black; } - should this be changed to something else? #whatwg

@theophani 
@zcorpan @WHATWG No.

@turmfalkenruf 
@zcorpan No, I think it's exactly right. What, did you want to add blinking? ;-)

@AurelioDeRosa 
@zcorpan I don't see a reason to change that style.

@divya 
@zcorpan STOP BIKESHEDDING!
]]

_Implementation_ feedback. :-)

Do people use it? If there are pages I could look at that use it and browsers that support it, that would be useful.

http://fr.ning.com/ has <mark> for all text basically, presumably a misguided SEO thing.

http://www.stumbleupon.com/
http://www.bt.dk/
http://www.womansday.com/
use <mark> but override the style.

That's basically what I could find from http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2012/04/html5-accessibility-chops-data-for-the-masses/ . web200904 has no instances of <mark>.

Opera/Firefox/Chrome/Safari appear to have implemented the spec's styling already and I have not seen any feedback about it from what I recall. I don't know about IE.

I wonder why there's 'color: black' though. An author would always need write an redundant 'color' declaration when he/she wants to override the style, instead of relying on 'color' inheritance.

What's the benefit of such a declaration in the UA?

Ditto for dialog { color: black; }.

You have to always set background and colour together otherwise you can make text invisible (e.g. if the page is yellow-on-black, and your <mark> style just sets the background to yellow, the text is now yellow-on-yellow).


Based on the notes above, I think the comment still applies.

(In reply to comment #5)
> You have to always set background and colour together otherwise you can make
> text invisible (e.g. if the page is yellow-on-black, and your <mark> style
> just sets the background to yellow, the text is now yellow-on-yellow).

"always" is just not true. Suppose I have dark gray on white and I am fine seeing dark gray on yellow, why do I have to bother to do 'mark { color: <dark gray>;'?

Browsers have to set the background because authors and users might be setting the foreground, and they can't control that. The problem isn't people who write pages that are dark gray on white, the problem is people who write pages that are yellow on black.

BTW, as a page author you're better off always setting a background color and color together too. After all, you never know when the user will have set one or the other in their user style sheet.