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Comment by kuschku | Hacker News Reader

There is a reason for this.

I happen to have an almost brand-new LCD screen here with LED backlight and high resolution, and a low-resultion over-a-decade-old LCD screen.

And guess what?

A website that looks totally fine on the old one is so blindingly bright on the new one that it hurts.

It literally hurts to look at.

This can be useful, as it provides a higher dynamic range, which can be used to recreate the blinding brightness of an explosion when watching a movie.

But it also means that websites have to use less contrasts.

The overall problem is:

We specify sizes in the web independent of the actual monitor size, with rem and em and pt and so on.

Why can’t we specify colors independent of the monitors actual contrast ratio, too?

Why can’t I have a website where the text seems to have the same contrast on and old and a new monitor, while that gif of an explosion is as blindingly bright as possible?

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There is a good reason why most serious monitor reviews/guides recommend adjusting the brightness waay down. I think the common standard is around 120cd/m², which should be comfortable in typical indoors ambient lightning.

This is also one of the reasons why "HDR" is sort of a thing now. It enables utilization of the high brightness that modern displays are capable of in a controlled fashion, somewhat like what you are asking. Pure sRGB white on a (properly configured) HDR display should not be eyewateringly bright, while media can still show even brighter colors/"superwhite" for effect.

Essentially the problem boils down to color management. The fundamentals for it have existed for decades, but it hasn't really broken through outside some professional contexts. I think the historical reason for this is that people were so happy to have any colors at all on their computers that very few stopped to think if the colors should be controlled in some fashion.

Same way that HiDPI displays has forced software and systems to be more resolution-independent, I think HDR displays will force some degree of color management to mainstream. I doubt we will be getting professional-grade factory calibration everywhere, but just having workable system-wide color management and any sort of display profiles, even if it is accurate only in the broad strokes.

Incidentally the poor color management support in software is the main reason not to by so called "wide-gamut" (=AdobeRGB) monitors, unless you know what you are doing. Despite typically having better factory calibration etc and overall color capability, tons of stuff will look cartoonishly garish because software (like browsers) are not properly accounting for the expanded colorspace.

On the other end of the spectrum you have people with 10 year old LCDs or crappy business displays that look similarly bad. On these displays even decent contrast is difficult to read.

> Why can’t we specify colors independent of the monitors actual contrast ratio, too?

I wonder if the CSS4 color-gamut media query work will be a good enough proxy for this? E.g.

    body { color: #fff; }

    @media (color-gamut: p3) {
      body { color: #eee; }
    }

Essentially the assumption is that a high gamut display will also be high contrast. I wonder how bad that assumption is going to be.

More details about color from webkit, https://webkit.org/blog/6682/improving-color-on-the-web/

I was suspecting the same thing, that the "too little contrast" trend is a sort of overcompensation for monitors that are way too bloody bright by default.

I turn my brightness and contrast down to sane levels, which means pure black on white/white on black becomes comfortable, but then lower contrast text becomes much more difficult to read.

Solution? Everyone should be taught to turn down the "vividness" on their monitors instead of trying to compensate (poorly) for this in software.

If it hurts to look at your monitor set to white, turn down the brightness. Get some room lighting so it's not the only light in the place. Stop doing this to yourself, but don't ruin everyone else's readability because your screen is too bright for your conditions.

The issue is that you might want to be able to display both – a darkness so deep that the nightsky looks bright, a brightness so bright that the sun looks dark, and at the same time a white that always looks like a page of a book, and a black that always looks like ink.

As said, it would be best if we had a way to specify colors in specific color spaces.

Then I could make a website that looks consistent no matter how bright the monitor is.

> Why can’t we specify colors independent of the monitors actual contrast ratio, too?

We do that already by default. Your displays are probably not calibrated and poorly configured. Sadly, manufacturers rarely bother to provide decent ICC profiles.

Well, I have profiles for them, but with the default profiles – which I have to use, because that’s what the end user will see – the issue occurs.

For personal use, I have obviously profiled them and configured a proper LUT for accurate colors ;)

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