When I get a chance, I'll restore the one-line change to the Red and Blue themes' CSS so striping in chatter will once again not be the default for those themes. And I'll post instructions on how to turn on striping in whatever colors you fancy. But the default chatter will have the same old colors, just with a few pixels of vertical space between uterrances (which you can also adjust via CSS). (And I'll restore the highlight colors in those themes to be the original, less-subtle shades.)

That is all (for now).

The chatter's default color stripes have now been removed from the Red and default (Blue) themes (they were never default in any other themes).

You can add colored stripes back in to your chatterbox by going to Display Settings and adding the following to your personal CSS:

td.highlight, tbody.nodelet td.highlight {
  background-color: #FEE;
}
[download]

where "#FEE" specifies a soft pink color. The first "td.highlight" controls the 'even' rows in non-nodelet chatter such as fullpage chat while the "tbody.nodelet td.highlight" controls them in the Chatterbox nodelet.

If you want the 'odd' rows to be a non-default color, then you can use

table.cb_table td,
tbody.nodelet table.cb_table td {
  background-color: #EFF;
}
table.cb_table td.highlight, tbody.nodelet table.cb_table td.highlight
+ {
  background-color: #FEE;
}
[download]

Note that specifying the color for the 'odd' rows in that way meant that the selectors for the 'even' ("highlight") rows had to become more specific.

I'm sure there are also other ways to do these. And feel free to post suggestions on how to customize the spacing, punctuation, etc. (you can all 'view source' to see what CSS classes and such are available for selecting on).

(I'd personally rather have the post-user-name "]" and ":" enclosed in a single 'span' instead of each having their own, but not enough to champion the effort / thrash to change that.)

Update: My prior update claiming that I'd made an mistake was in error.

- tye        

Thanks. I depend on the CSS hackers here to help me limp along.

I use the JBlue theme, and I've found that #004 is a useful stripe background color, not too dark, and not to shiny. (My wetware is hardwired to orient to shiny objects at all times :)

-QM
--
Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of

You'd said you'd post instructions on how to turn on striping, have you? If so, could you kindly point me there?

-Scott

Speaking completely unofficially (I'm not responsible for the changes or any planning, I'm just the self-appointed messenger), I can come up with a few partial answers:
1. The structures of various components are changing, which requires some change to the CSS.
2. While new things are being implemented, it's useful to have them show up for lots of people to see what kind of acceptance they get.
3. Some features that weren't available before are thought to have broad enough appeal that it makes sense to make them the default. This is where input becomes valuable.
4. At some point, the number of themes would become unwieldy, at least to the point that it's hard to locate a good one, so the selection has to be limited.
That said, it may be that "classic" and "new" versions of some themes will be issued. I don't know; I expect it depends on feedback from the users.

---

Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.

Just for reference for whomever is doing this, I don't see any striping in the CB with Safari (Version 2.0.1 (412.5), OS X 10.4.2 w/current patches.

And since I don't see it I have no comment on the striping :)

Update: Just to add more information for someone trying to track down what's wrong: I do use the green theme and have a minimal personal CSS set (basically changes the header fonts to Baskerville and that's about it).