Standardized way of graying out normal HTML text

Question

Is there a standardized way of graying (greying) out text that is meant to be ignored, either in HTML, or bootstrap?

I tried looking at both how Slack styles the "(edited)" text, and how Twitter itself (twitter.com) styles timestamps, and it seems they just change the font color. It just seems strange to me that an arbitrary font color is chosen without any semantic information is attached to it, or even a standardized shade of gray.

The bootstrap documentation mentions some semantic colors, but gray isn't included in them - gray is only mentioned in grayscale.

Answer 1

There is actually a standard way to do it, in bootstrap, which is to use to use text-muted.

In fact, there is a list of standard text shades and colors that are applied directly.

http://www.w3schools.com/bootstrap/bootstrap_ref_css_helpers.asp

As for HTML, having a CSS with a disabled class and applying that to any of your text would be a better option.

Answer 2

Standard HTML Input Forms

An example of this is disabling HTML input elements, though there's not a standard display of that across browsers.

http://codepen.io/anthonyastige/pen/dXNEmx

<input type=button value="I can do all the things">
<input type=button value="I'm disabled" disabled>

Bootstrap Input Forms

There's also the concept of disabling input elements here with the .disabled class

https://getbootstrap.com/css/#checkboxes-and-radios

Bootstrap text

The .text-muted class implies disabled, though the specs don't say exactly what it means.

https://getbootstrap.com/css/#helper-classes