{"id":1360,"date":"2007-10-09T07:00:24","date_gmt":"2007-10-09T12:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1360"},"modified":"2007-10-09T07:00:24","modified_gmt":"2007-10-09T12:00:24","slug":"backgrounds-ffffff-vs-000000","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1360","title":{"rendered":"Backgrounds: #FFFFFF vs. #000000"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I re-did my theme last week<\/a> several people lamented that I wasn’t going with light text on a black background. The complaint seems to be that black-on-white sites (like this one) are painful to read. <\/p>\n

I found this interesting, because my experience is precisely the opposite: Light letters on a dark background are brutal on my eyes. After just one paragraph of that I’ll have horizontal lines burned into my vision when I look away. It seems like my eye notices that the presented image is mostly<\/i> black, and dilates accordingly. The bright letters are then free to scorch the everlovin’ crap out of my optic nerve. Clicking through from a black page to a white page delivers a seizure-inducing burst of light. <\/p>\n

Things to note about how I use my computer:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. I have a 19″ CRT monitor, with the screen refresh set to the maximum. (85Htz.)\n<\/li>\n
  2. I have carefully placed the lights in this room so that I never get any reflective glare. If you replaced my screen with a mirror and sat in my chair, you wouldn’t be able to see a single light source or window in the reflection. (Glare is one of the major reasons I hated working in an office. Offices are perfect environments for maximizing screen glare, with a half dozen light sources bouncing off of each and every screen in the room. Brutal.)\n<\/li>\n
  3. My room is a bit dim.\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    So I have several theories about people who prefer black pages:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Perhaps they are using laptops or flat-screen monitors, and perhaps those screens work best with white-on-black. I don’t have enough time in front of laptops to judge.\n<\/li>\n
    2. Maybe their monitor refresh rate is low. I find that anything under 70Htz, well, hurts<\/i> when looking at all white. It’s like staring into a strobe. While low refresh rates are cruel in general, black backgrounds are less abusive than white in these sorts of setups.\n<\/li>\n
    3. Maybe their monitor is smaller, and thus doesn’t dominate their vision the way larger monitors might.\n<\/li>\n
    4. Perhaps they are in environments with a lot of glare? Maybe that glossy blob of light forever smeared across the upper left corner of the screen keeps the eye from acting like you’re staring into a dark hole.\n<\/li>\n
    5. Maybe they are sensible types who use their computer in a well-lit room.\n<\/li>\n
    6. Maybe they are just, like, different and stuff.\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      White on black just isn’t an option for this site, since I need to be able to read the thing without going blind. Still, I feel bad for people who struggle with white backgrounds. Those are by far the most common sort of site, and so the internet must be an uncomfortable place for them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      When I re-did my theme last week several people lamented that I wasn’t going with light text on a black background. The complaint seems to be that black-on-white sites (like this one) are painful to read. I found this interesting, because my experience is precisely the opposite: Light letters on a dark background are brutal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1360\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}