A company less colorful

Tonight, I stared at the https://blogs.sun.com/ site and realized that the entries I once wrote would soon have an Oracle logo on top. That’s just not right. They can’t just make me become one their bloggers. It’s unfair!

Well, anyway. While staring at the rebranded front page, I wonder how they made the transition. I remember that – in the past – Sun went over a couple of rebranding efforts. Rather than actually changing the CSS classes in use, they would actually redefine those classes. But since most of the classes were for one sole purpose only – to set the color – they used the names of these colors as the names of the CSS classes.

So you would have a CSS class called purple. In order to adopt the new style, they just redefined purple to be yellow from now on. So the CSS would have something like this:

.purple { color: yellow; }

It turns out they did exactly the same thing for restyling the Oracle way: they replaced all color definitions to shades of grey:

/* table colors */
table.dkgrey{background:#666}
.sunred{background:#f00}
.sunblue{background:#525252}
.sunyellow{background:#a4a4a4}
.sunred,.sunblue,td.sunred a,td.sunblue a{color:#fff}
td.sunred b,td.sunred div.navtitle{color:#9f9f9f;font-weight:bold}
td.sunred li,td.sunblue li,td.sunred ul,td.sunblue ul{color:#fff;list-style-image:url("../im/ic_bullet_white.gif")}
td.sunyellow b,td.sunyellow div.navtitle,td.sunyellow a:link,td.sunyellow a:visited{color:#000}
td.sunyellow a:hover{color:#666;text-decoration:underline}
table.white,td.white,th.white,tr.white td,tr.white th,table tr td.white,table tr th.white,td.white,table.white1,td.white1,th.white1,tr.white1 td,tr.white1 th,table tr td.white1,table tr th.white1,td.white1{background:#fff}
table.ltgrey,td.ltgrey,th.ltgrey,tr.ltgrey td,tr.ltgrey th,table tr td.ltgrey,table tr th.ltgrey{background:#ccc}
table.vltgrey,td.vltgrey,th.vltgrey,tr.vltgrey td,tr.vltgrey th,table tr td.vltgrey,table tr th.vltgrey{background:#ddd}
table.grey3,td.grey3,th.grey3,tr.grey3 td,tr.grey3 th,table tr td.grey3,table tr th.grey3{background:#e3e3e3}
table.blue1,td.blue1,th.blue1,tr.blue1 td,tr.blue1 th,table tr td.blue1,table tr th.blue1{background:#999}
table.yellow2,td.yellow2,th.yellow2,tr.yellow2 td,tr.yellow2 th,table tr td.yellow2,table tr th.yellow2{background:#fff}

It can’t help feeling there’s a message hidden here.