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> For over 1000 years black text on white paper has been the best practice for printed texts worldwide. This alone almost made me stop reading the article. Wh

• Myndex 4y ago
  NOWHERE, absolutely nowhere in the article did I suggest using #fff/#000 On the contrary, I highly recommend that for light backgrounds the, background directly under body text be something like #e6e2dd. I explain this in the article.
• hexo 4y ago
  You should avoid giving "advice". Because of ppl like you I have to constantly mess with CSS and have ton of extensions just to fix colors, just because you knew better.... oh my.
• deleted 4y ago
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• hnlmorg 4y ago
  Paper isn't typically a pure "#FFFFFF" white and if you'd bothered to read the article instead of rage quitting after the sub-heading you'd realise that the article is advocating exactly the same point you are. Let me quote it for you: > On a light or white background, body text should be black. In many cases it is more appropriate to reduce contrast by darkening the background. As an example a white #FFF background is really too bright for comfortable reading, a background such as #e8e2dd provides a less fatiguing background. Sorry if I come across blunt but if you're going to be critical about an article then at least read more than the sub-heading first.
  • Hnrobert42 4y ago
    First, GP didn’t rage quit, but merely said they almost did. Second, accusing posters of not reading articles is against the Hacker News guidelines. Third, I bring all this up because the vitriol of your comment is no fun to read and brings down the site.
    • hnlmorg 4y ago
      Normally I'd agree with all of your points but the article is really clear about lowing the page brightness and not the page contrast. They even had an infographic to illustrate their point: https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*xOhOFGLr6o4AsGhlACweSQ.png https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*xOhOFGLr6o4AsGhlACweSQ.pn... At no point were they making any of the suggestions the GP are criticising them for.
    • coldtea 4y ago
      On the contrary, I find that the "vitriol" was a good balance to the "rage quitting" disclaimer raising the rage level for no reason. It's an article about text legibility. We should be able to take it or leave it or refute it without rage. (Whether they rage quit or "merely said they almost did" is same difference).
  • jraph 4y ago
    > Paper isn't typically a pure "#FFFFFF" white Paper can be very white and bright if well lit. Much more than a typical LED/LCD screen. If your screen is brighter than a white sheet of paper, it's probably too bright and you are probably tiring your eyes. The only moment when a sheet of paper is darker than my screen is when I'm in my bed, in a completely dark room watching or reading something, and that's not known as a very good thing to do for the eyes (and for the body posture neither by the way). I'm not buying the fact we should darken the background of a text. I think we should let people reduce the brightness of their screen instead.
    • marginalia_nu 4y ago
      This is modern bleached paper. Regular paper (or parchment since we're talking 1000 years) is anywhere from beige to light gray.
• jraph 4y ago
  > You should avoid using extremes like #000000 and #ffffff If it's too much contrast for you, maybe your screen is not setup correctly (too bright), or you don't zoom enough. Or your room is not correctly lit. Black on white should be comfortable. Don't force me to squint or to use way too much brightness sucking too much power to compensate for poor contrast. People are fine with office suites despite (thanks to?) them defaulting to black on white. We would have known by the time it if was an issue.
  • kqr 4y ago
    I disagree. If you have a screen that is capable of showing high enough contrast that you can have true highlights and true blacks, then why should you make image quality worse just because someone else is unable to reproduce that? I guess the real problem is that there's no real standard for what #fff means – it has to be interpreted through a colour space, which in turn does not talk about brightness, I think.
    • seanmcdirmid 4y ago
      Unless you are running with an OLED, reproducing #fff is really hard anyways. Just like unless you have e-ink, active lit #000 is going to basically be a light bulb.
      • kuschku 4y ago
        Reproducing #ffffff and #000000 is relatively possible on higher level monitors that have HDR support and full-array local dimming or a dual-layer LCD. While these monitors shine in HDR mode, most of them are also useful for getting a perfect SDR image out of them.
      • sokoloff 4y ago
        I think you are using those colors backwards from the way I usually see them (which made your sentence fairly difficult to parse).
    • micahdeath 4y ago
• snowwrestler 4y ago
  If you actually measure the color of printed text, like in novels or newspapers, it is rarely pure black. It’s just really hard to make pure black in real life. It is typically a very dark purplish gray. In addition, the paper it’s on is almost never pure white. And, as a reflective medium, the perceived colors of paper and ink vary with ambient lighting. So in digital: should one create sufficient contrast to read? Yes, definitely do that. Stay well inside accessibility guidelines. But a site absolutely does not need pure black text on white background to do that. And in fact at high screen brightness, that level of contrast risks creating little bits of ghost text in some people’s vision.
  • jraph 4y ago
    But if you measure how #000 is rendered on a screen, you'll also notice that it's not actually pure black too, because as you said, "It’s just really hard to make pure black in real life" and your screen responds to the same laws of physics as anything else. So there's no need to pick something else that #000 to avoid having actually pure black.
  • hedora 4y ago
    I've never understood this argument. If the display had pure black (depending on the definition of pure black here), it would either be an ideal absorber or reflector across the EM spectrum. My phone is not a theoretically ideal mirror, and it also doesn't accidentally cryogenically freeze surfaces when it's face down and displaying a black screen. Similarly, it cannot boil water or charge my house's solar batteries if I display an all #fff screen. (If it could do these things, then I'd argue for clamping contrast in the display driver, not in untrusted CSS code!) Even in the realm of thermodynamically plausible displays, if it is so bright it's burning stuff into your retina, then turn the brightness down before you permanently have an xkcd burnt on to your retina! Also, I'm reasonably certain such a monitor would fail safety certifications, so maybe don't buy black / gray market hardware, then ruin it for the rest of us?
• noisem4ker 4y ago
  >it is equally important that things aren't too bright That's why your display has a brightness control. At least as long as we're stuck with implicit sRGB, until the web gets proper HDR support, don't murder the contrast of text. You never know the actual viewing conditions (probably less ideal than a well-lit office), and it's foolish to limit it at the source.
• pabs3 4y ago
  I found this reflective LCD monitor pretty interesting and that it might solve the brightness issues people have with existing displays. https://www.sunvisiondisplay.com/reflective-lcd-monitor https://www.sunvisiondisplay.com/reflective-lcd-monitor https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31203809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31203809 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ehqj0W3koP0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ehqj0W3koP0
  • seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    Are they just re-inventing the passive LCD that we used to have as a budget option for laptops in the 90s?
    • pabs3 4y ago
      No, it sounds like it is more complicated than that.
• coldtea 4y ago
  >but it is equally important that things aren't too bright. That's controllable at the screen end. Even if people use off-white background on webpages, you'd still get white screen real estate in UIs and other places (default Word and Excel background, for one. textarea boxes for another).
• tomxor 4y ago
  I've got this exact problem when trying to meet accessibility criteria. I would have no issue with sticking #000 on #FFF, except for the fact not everyone has e-ink displays and it's like shining an LED torch in everyone's faces. If it's inverted to #FFF on #000 this is pretty much solved - but this is a hard sell for most product teams.
  • chefandy 4y ago
    As the article clearly states, tinting the background while leaving the text at the extremes is the correct choice.
    • necovek 4y ago
      To add to that, article also brings the point of spacing and font weight, which are equally important. Dark backgrounds with light text require heavier font weights (esp with subpixel rendering) for proper contrast.
• victorvscn 4y ago
  I don't think things are nearly as clear-cut. Personally, I like things to be near the extremes, I use OLED screens, and then I deal with it by changing my brightness. I prefer having contrast which I can easily control with brightness settings than not having contrast and then there's nothing I can do. The ideal situation is where people can change stuff to what works for them, which is why I use the Dark Reader extension. It's the best extension in that it not only lets you easily change brightness and contrast, light/dark, but, most of all, has a crowdsourced file that carries special settings for each website over which elements should be inverted, which elements shouldn't, or whether there's an element that shouldn't be touched at all, for instance. I have used such extensions in the past (and even welcomed stuff like Chrome's automatic dark mode) but unless they come with perfect AI—which they don't—they're not gonna match Dark Reader's crowdsourcing.
• evrydayhustling 4y ago
  Also, anyone who thinks printed text is actually black hasn't worked with print. And how on earth does someone make this argument while using text and background that are two different shades of purple?
  • necovek 4y ago
    They complain about Medium's theme choices at least 4 times in the article, and claim that this theme is the best contrast they can get.
    • alisonkisk 4y ago
    • GrumpyNl 4y ago
      Lighthouse disagrees, Background and foreground colors do not have a sufficient contrast ratio.
      • necovek 4y ago
        I guess that's why the OP complains as well. I do wonder if none of the other Medium themes have a better contrast, but the OP obviously felt that they needed to explain their (lack of) choice of non-contrasty colours.
  • mdp2021 4y ago
    > anyone who thinks printed text is actually black ... worked with print Not clear. We always normally printed in K - insaturated black. Or, "typographic black", or "sufficiently black black", or "just black". «[A]ctually black» requires a definition.
• sackerhews 4y ago
  > What worked for printed text has no bearing for what works on an illuminated screen. Yes it does. > ... but it is equally important that things aren't too bright. You should avoid using extremes like #000000 and #ffffff ... No, you shouldn't avoid them. Users are fully capable of adjusting the brightness and contrast of their monitors. > Believe me, as a 50+ year old, I notice when it's hard to read things. I believe you. I just don't think your personal experience is relevant.
  • Avamander 4y ago
    > Users are fully capable of adjusting the brightness and contrast of their monitors. It'd be a hack. The buttons are not sturdy enough for it, they're even not designed for it and the colour representation will be very incorrect. Instead of asking every website to blast every user with the highest amount of contrast, modify your own display to do so if your eyes need it. That way the need and the solution is localized to where it should be.
• tzs 4y ago
  > What worked for printed text has no bearing for what works on an illuminated screen. I find this hard to believe because in both cases what we actually perceive patterns in the light that enters our eyes. It would seem to follow that only aspects of the reading surface that cause difference in the light patterns (color, intensity, phase, coherence) and the time evolution of those patterns can affect matter when it comes to how well something works for reading. If we determine, whether from printed text on paper, inked text in tattoos, skywriting in smoke, or anything else that certain relationships that some kinds or combinations of the aforementioned aspects of light matter or don't matter, that should remain true when we are reading from screens or from any other existing or yet to be developed form of reading device.
• aidenn0 4y ago
  Except so many programs use black-on-white, that I've adjusted my monitor for that, and black-on-gray is now too low contrast...
• marcosdumay 4y ago
  I really dislike that kind of argument. It's not because it's wrong, but because it's not right either. A monitor can easily be adjusted so that the contrast between #000 and #fff isn't too much. In fact, most displays have a setting named "contrast" just for that, but what actually makes things too bright is the "brightness" one, that is usually more prominent. People will have opinions all over the place about it, because they do get results all over the place. Instead, yes, you should avoid using the extrema. But that's because if you use them in a normal situation, you won't have any more extreme values when you need them in a special situation. People should be able to change the color schema anyway, so you are better with a functional choice.
• deleted 4y ago
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• notorandit 4y ago
  > What worked for printed text has no bearing for what works on an illuminated screen. This alone almost made me stop reading the answer. This people is talking about accessibility. So, the more contrast, the better. You want to "highlight" something? Bold uses thicker fonts, underline adds also more pixels. You can add a carefully selected background, like a medium gray or other light color. But black on white it not to highlight. Is to make it readable. To anyone.