Themes result in invisible text in many cases

[rschristian]

Apologies in advance if this seems rather daft but I'm quite confused as to why this is practiced and how it's meant to be avoided (as I presume I'm missing something).

I notice in most of the themes (if not all), the 9th entry in the XFCE color palette (I'm guessing the idea is it's mapped to base 00) matches the background color. However, if any terminal application tries to use the "dark grey" color, and many do, you'll end up with invisible text/output. I don't really understand how this is meant to be usable? For example, my $LS_COLORS value has a whole bunch of file types mapped to 00;90 (default text style w/ dark grey color) and so when I run ls, there's huge gaps in the output taken up by files w/ text that matches the background.

Surely, at a minimum, you cannot match the background color in any one of the palette entries? I understand the base16 system defines only 16 colors, but that seemingly is incompatible with any program (like xfce4-terminal) that takes 16 colors + a background & foreground.

I must be doing something wrong but I'm not quite sure what? How do you ensure the palette color which matches the background color is never used? And why define the palette color to match at all in that case?