I think it is time to separate the Real Life Values from the SpongeBob® cartoon foolishness here and now. Two years into the 2.0cultureshock, I am becoming pissed.

People, all the 2.0culture effects can be very nice and impressive. The article provides some really decent design tips. But why oh WHY is it that every criking Web2.0 site on Earth’s “clouds” provides the main meal (the body text, that is) exclusively in a nastily luminance-diluted and utterly watered-down pastel LOW CONTRAST manner?

People, I and many others of the prior generation – you know, the one that who pioneered the Web1.0 that you newcomer kids with all your fancy trained-by-college vocational degrees all now take for granted and have come out to improve upon with your 2.0culture schlock, are now over fifty years young. Our bodies are slowing down, so we drink less coffee and eat less fat than you hollow-legged office-lurkin’ young’uns.

But these superior time/resource efficiencies and related mature-soul improvements in our experienced bodily operations are offset by one horrid 2.0culture reality:

GREY BODY TEXT EVERYWHERE! KIDS, THAT SUCKS!

You youngsters have apparently decided that it is a Really Neat Thing to grey your page body text right out to near-subliminal intensity on the page background. Right out to the point that we elders, whose aging eyes have seen so much change and even a little improvement in this wicked-ized youth-cultural world just cannot any longer, without major needless effort on our own tech-savvy part, even read most of what you write!

This is so even with that nice big 2.0culturized sans-serif font sizing

Fact: On most 2.0culture sites, I find I must highlight the entire page to read the pastel content at all. A click+drag often (but not always) makes for an ugly though readably high-contrast workaround. Click+control-A also does the trick, albeit in a VERY ugly manner indeed. Web1.0 standard-issue black-as-black text does not do that to me, or to anyone else either, you see.

Sometimes I find that I am forced by dint of the pastel-grey contrasts (even when highlighted ugly-but-readable) to clipboard the text of interest and transfer it to OpenOffice Writer, which I pray Heaven shall NEVER go pastel!

Fail on you under-forties for this. Damn the blindness! Not my own four-eyed bifocal-ized eyesight, though. No, kids, it is clearly YOUR utterly generally-absent though lovely-when-found attribute of compassionate non-faulty intelligent human foresight that has created this hostile-to-elders Web environment!

Is it youthful ignorance? Or is it gen-war Chicago School malice? I simply cannot tell that it makes a real difference. We elders are in fact being quite systematically and effectively “greyed away off” the Web that WE created for YOU by dint of YOUR (to put it kindly) apparently naive lust for implementing ALL 2.0culture effects you think you can get away with.

A mere subset of those effects – a subset that is engineered to the requirements of the entire human age spectrum – would certainly stand as a pleasant experience indeed for all concerned, decade upon productive decade.

It is foolish and selfish, as I for one find it, to embrace a 100% pastel design esthetic with no regard for the well-being, time, happiness and eyesight of elder others whom you have never met except maybe through little notes such as this one. To put it in SubGenius terms: IT IS ‘WAY PINK.

Therefore I suggest to all you fine energetic enthusiastic Web2.0culture whippersnappers that you all consider this one key Fact of Life at leisure:

You, too, shall grow old.

You too shall still love the Web, even as your creative forebears do. And you shall, unless you start RIGHT NOW to code a WEB@.0culture-STANDARD “High-Contrast” TOGGLE-LINK into the very top inch of each and every Web2.0culture-ized page you code, sooner or later be hoisted on the petard of your own foresight-less 2.0culture-foolish and (yes) entirely avoidable Inner Hubris.

Kindly think about it. I for one shall sing the praises of any 2.0culture site I find that includes the requisite contrast-enhancement TOGGLE-LINK coding to the skies. Other sites of pastel paleness and thoughtless indifference to the very real needs of elder others, I already take the time from out of my own extremely busy and joyously productive life to register a BIG thumbs-down on ‘em wherever and whenever I can.

This I do on the basis that the Web page that cannot be easily read by ALL VIEWERS, and NOT merely by the semi-literate twenty-something ones with sexy-perfect teeth and skin and clothes and car and *eyes* is just not worth the powder it’d take to blow its server to the moon.

After all, it is all about the LIGHT, you see.

Um, the thoughtlessly stubborn and elder-hating dedicated medicated pastel-text coder of the 2.0culture ilk just might not merit the same compassionate forbearance re the requisite powder, hm?

The trouble with being a geek is that it is all head and no heart. The trouble with being human is in keeping a strong and beautiful BALANCE between the two, all day and in the nighttime too. It is not “fuddly-duddly stuffy-stuff” at all. It is How To Live LONG *and* WELL.

Get it? GOT it? If ever so, then GOOD on you!

Thank you for remembering this item, 2.0culturalists of Geeky Planet Earth!