iBooks Night Mode Overriding CSS

[dgatwood]

I'm assuming that you already have the magic file in there that tells iBooks to use the publisher-specified fonts, right? I would expect any "We'll fix your broken books" behavior to be keyed off of the presence or absence of that file; if somebody has take the time to update their content to work in iBooks, then there's no need to assume that the content is broken, and if they haven't, then it probably is broken.

Either way, I want to strongly disagree with JSWolf's advice. Please do file bugs every time you find something that doesn't behave the way you expect it to behave. This does three things:

1. It ensures that the development team knows that a particular behavior is dubious.
2. It ensures that they have an accurate picture of how many people that behavior is causing problems for.
3. If it really is an expected behavior and they have already come up with a better way of doing what you're trying to do, they'll tell you and save you a lot of wasted time.

I can't tell you how many times I've filed a bug and been told, "You're the first one to complain about it" even though people have been whining and kvetching about it on forums for years. You can safely assume that nobody will ever fix problems that they haven't been told about, and that the priority of bug fixes is proportional to the number of people it affects.

You should never assume that developers of any application, whether they work at Apple or Adobe or Kobo or B&N or Amazon or whatever, have any idea that they've broken something, because 99 times out of 100, they don't. They're not producing content that has to work with the devices; they're producing devices that have to work with the content. You folks—the people who are in the trenches producing content—are the ones who know what problems you're hitting in the real world.

More to the point, you're the ones who notice and hear about it when your content breaks. When your content breaks, it is quite frequently caused by a poorly designed fix to work around something wrong with somebody else's content. But if your content is right, it should take priority over somebody else whose content is wrong. By screaming early and often, you ensure that poorly engineered fixes don't become so engrained in the behavior of an app that they can't be changed, and you greatly increase the chances of the engineering team going back to fix the problem the right way. The earlier you notice a bug, the easier it is to fix, and all that.

So please do file bugs. Please.

[JSWolf]

This isn't a bug. It's a feature request. If you do file this as a bug, it very well may get ignored since it's not a bug. If you do report this to Apple, do so as a feature request.

[dgatwood]

I agree that supporting the night colors feature of the specification is either a feature request or an enhancement request, depending on how you look at it.

But when I said "file a bug", I was talking about the comment that iBooks was ignoring the specified background color and substituting its own even when the CSS specified !important. If that's really happening (as opposed to something more subtle), then I would call that a bug.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by dgatwood

I agree that supporting the night colors feature of the specification is either a feature request or an enhancement request, depending on how you look at it.

But when I said "file a bug", I was talking about the comment that iBooks was ignoring the specified background color and substituting its own even when the CSS specified !important. If that's really happening (as opposed to something more subtle), then I would call that a bug.

It's not a bug. iBooks is specifically overriding color settings in order to have night mode. That's the way it's written. So it's still not a bug. You go into night mode and your colors are overridden. So what you want to do is something iBooks doesn't do because it was programmed to override.

So what you are asking for is a feature request. It's not a bug.

[dgatwood]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

It's not a bug. iBooks is specifically overriding color settings in order to have night mode. That's the way it's written. So it's still not a bug.

By that standard, there's no such thing as a bug, because every bug is something that the code was programmed to do.

The intent of !important is to be a line in the sand. It indicates that your content could break if the style is overridden by other styles. The CSS spec didn't allow user agent stylesheets to override those for a reason, and folks designing eBook readers should respect that decision. For that reason, I consider it a spec compliance bug when a reader crosses that line.

Either way, the question of whether it is a bug or a feature request is pretty much quibbling over semantics. They all go into the same bug queue, and if the people who get the report decide that a bug should be a feature request or vice-versa, they can change it in less time than it took you to set it in the first place.

Just please don't set it to "Security".

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by dgatwood

By that standard, there's no such thing as a bug, because every bug is something that the code was programmed to do.

The intent of !important is to be a line in the sand. It indicates that your content could break if the style is overridden by other styles. The CSS spec didn't allow user agent stylesheets to override those for a reason, and folks designing eBook readers should respect that decision. For that reason, I consider it a spec compliance bug when a reader crosses that line.

Either way, the question of whether it is a bug or a feature request is pretty much quibbling over semantics. They all go into the same bug queue, and if the people who get the report decide that a bug should be a feature request or vice-versa, they can change it in less time than it took you to set it in the first place.

Just please don't set it to "Security".

If I programmed iBooks to allow you to set a background color in night mode and it did not work, then that would be a bug.

If I programmed iBooks to override background colors in night mode and that's what is does, then it's not a bug.

So in this case, it's not a bug as it was specifically programmed to override background colors in night mode. It's not semantics. Its not a bug.

You want to put in a feature request.

[Jellby]

What Jon says is that bugs are unintentional. If it's intentional, no matter how wrong or harmful it is, it is not, strictly, a bug.

[mattmc]

For anyone that comes along here when looking for a way to control styles in Night Mode for iBooks, check this out:

theme-detect.css by adaptivegarage

[dgatwood]

Note that as shown in the stylesheet linked above, !important styles that conflict with the iBooks root styles are not ignored, so long as your style has higher specificity. I actually documented a similar quirk in iBooks' stylesheets a while back, where their use of the universal selector makes life kind of miserable if you use the -webkit-font-smoothing property.

The important thing to remember is that the CSS specificity rules are critical to understanding how things will be interpreted. If you have a paragraph class called light that forces the text to be black on white and you do this:

<p class="light">Blah blah <i>foo</i> blah</p>

you will end up with foo in night colors because the universal selector will be applied to the italic tag in the absence of a rule in your own stylesheet that overrides it.

The universal selector is a nuclear weapon, and should be used very sparingly. Unfortunately, the iBooks team seems to have fallen into the same trap that the Nook team did, resulting in many of the same headaches. Fortunately, it is possible to override those universal selectors, though you'll need to use a universal descendant selector:

.light, .light *
{
background-color: #ffffff !important;
color: #000000 !important;
}

That should work. Use sparingly.

Obviously, if you want to only override something in night mode, you'd need to go one step further:

:root[__ibooks_internal_theme*="Night"] .light, :root[__ibooks_internal_theme*="Night"] .light *
{
background-color: #ffffff !important;
color: #000000 !important;
}