5

I was wondering why the chosen styling data is provided though the API. It makes sense to provide it, but I feel like we are only getting part of the information.

"styling": {
    "link_color": {
      "description": "color of links, as a CSS style color value",
      "values": "string",
      "optional": false
    },
    "tag_foreground_color": {
      "description": "foreground color of tags, as a CSS style color value",
      "values": "string",
      "optional": false
    },
    "tag_background_color": {
      "description": "background/fill color of tags, as a CSS style color value",
      "values": "string",
      "optional": false
    }
}

It seems to me that we should be provided with stuff like background color, accepted answer color, no answer color, border styles, etc. Or, why provide any style information at all?

2
  • Well, remember the rules: "Don't copy the look and feel..." so the more color info they provide, the more it will look like the real thing. Jul 9, 2010 at 19:02
  • @George Right, but why do they provide any info at all then?
    – jjnguy
    Jul 9, 2010 at 19:17

1 Answer 1

3

This feature came about after some internal discussion.

The gist of it was, what's the bare minimum you need to make a question link look like it belongs to a given site? link_color, tag_foreground_color, and tag_background_color are what came out of that discussion.

The reason for restricting to just that subset of a site is that, as George Edison pointed out, we don't want people copying the look and feel of a site wholesale.

5
  • So, you decided that this was enough info to determine the site a link belongs to? Where do tags fit into that?
    – jjnguy
    Jul 9, 2010 at 19:41
  • @jjnguy - we assumed the common case when linking a question would be to display its title (link_color) and the tags on it (tag_foreground_color and tag_background_color). Jul 9, 2010 at 19:45
  • ...and this is not considered copying the look and feel? Jul 9, 2010 at 19:57
  • 1
    @George - using the colors the API provides to style question links and tags is A-OK. Jul 9, 2010 at 20:18
  • 1
    Great! I just switched all my stuff to 1.0 when I saw that my stuff stopped responding. Jul 9, 2010 at 20:23

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