Chameleon breadcrumbs

[kevinmcl]

Flare 7.2 on Windows 7 Pro.

Output is regular WebHelp.

I changed the appearance of my breadcrumbs proxy and breadcrumbs link styles from charcoal-gray text on white to orange text on charcoal. (Hey, don't look at me like that - a slightly de-saturated orange is one of our corporate branding colors... really...)

When I browse the Help, the top-level and near-top-level topics have breadcrumbs strip with the expected appearance.
When I get a little deeper into the tree, SOME portions of the breadcrumb text reverts to charcoal, but the background remains charcoal, making SOME portions of the breadcrumbs invisible (until mouseover).

How do I make it behave? I've tried a few different browsers, and republished my help, but the effect remains.
Here are some examples, starting with the way it SHOULD look:

breadcrumbs_complete.png

... then the way it looks on some topics with longer paths:

breadcrumbs_with_gaps.png

... then the same with mouseover, to show that the text is still there:

breadcrumbs_with_gaps_fiddled_on_capture.png

I'd like suggestions to fix it please... not to simply admonitions to revert to the original color scheme (whatever you might think of its artistic merits... ahem...).
My QA reviewer was quite pleased with the look on the initial pages ... until he saw the effect on the deeper pages.

-kevin

[LTinker68]

The breadcrumbs are put in a DIV. By any chance did you change some of the attributes for your base DIV. For example, vertical-align, overflow, display, etc.? If so, you'll have to set the same attributes in the div.MCBreadcrumbsBox_0 style but set them to what the default should be. So if you set the base DIV to have vertical-align:bottom, then in the div.MCBreadcrumbsBox_0 style set the vertical-align attribute to top. Don't set it to "not set", because the default behavior is to inherit and you don't want it to inherit.

[NorthEast]

If your normal link colours use charcoal (e.g. for visited links), then I would check you've set a different colour for the corresponding breadcrumbs link style (pseudo class).

[kevinmcl]

Your explanations didn't make a lot of sense to me, because the difference between a breadcrumbs sequence that shows up properly and one that doesn't is a matter of going down a level in the path. And when I'd go deeper, it was often an element that was previously visible (when the same path was just one level shorter), that became invisible (wrong text color) when I reached the new, lower-level topic. I'm pretty sure the breadcrumbs structure was not assigning new style names to the same element, just because that element was no longer the bottom of the path.

In other cases, it was just every alternate element in the lengthy breadcrumb path that decided to go invisible (take on the background color as text color). Again, if I went up a level (using the browser Back button, or simply picking a higher-level topic out of the ToC, the problem went away (for the moment).

Anyway, the point now seems moot.

I installed Flare 8 a couple of days ago and began playing with it, using a copy of the problem project. My first official act was to switch over to HTML5 Skin and tweak it a little. When I publish (with the same breadcrumbs proxy and the same styles for the components of the breadcrumbs), the appearance is just fine, regardless of how deep or shallow the topic that's being browsed. So far, it just works.

[NorthEast]

I installed Flare 8 a couple of days ago and began playing with it, using a copy of the problem project. My first official act was to switch over to HTML5 Skin and tweak it a little. When I publish (with the same breadcrumbs proxy and the same styles for the components of the breadcrumbs), the appearance is just fine, regardless of how deep or shallow the topic that's being browsed. So far, it just works.

The way breadcrumbs are constructed in the output is different between the WebHelp and HTML5 outputs; in WebHelp they're 'a' tags, and in HTML5 help they're span tags. Anyway, that would suggest the original issue was the link colours; presumably one of your link colours is set to be grey.