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Comment by sarreph | Hacker News Reader

It's never an absolute, but for a similar justification to the you've given for white — it creates too much contrast, and is therefore most often (especially in print and on bright displays), uncomfortable to look at: "[Pure] black and white create the highest contrast possible".[0]

HN's body text is actually pure black (as far as I can tell) and works alright because it's on an orange/grey background, but if you play around with black text on a white background, you should find that a few HEX notches above #000 (say #333, for example) is much more pleasant to look at.

The abstinence of pure black doesn't irritate me, but taking design advice from IBM does :)

[0] - https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/25356/why-...

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> HN's body text is actually pure black (as far as I can tell) and works alright because it's on an orange/grey background, but if you play around with black text on a white background, you should find that a few HEX notches above #000 (say #333, for example) is much more pleasant to look at.

And I immediately tried that. My impression: it miiight be pleasant to look at, subjectively; but it's harder to read, which is the actual purpose of text (most of the time).

Pure black and white don't create too much contrast. I'd like to see some actual research if anyone claims that it does. And there is a contrast button on every monitor to turn it down.

Anecdotally, I find pure black + pure white rather uncomfortable to look at for any long period of time. (Pure white especially, but the combination of the two is particularly bad.)

It wasn't always that way, maybe something to do with my current eyeglass prescription, or just fatigue from staring at monitors all day? I don't know.

But regardless, one of the things I've learned about UI design is not to dismiss other people's concerns about text readability. Just because you have great eyes (for now), doesn't mean everyone else does too. :)

It's better that people that are bothered by white backgrounds dial down the background light on the monitor. Saves energy too!

I agree. I’d rather put it like this: Pure black/white most easily shows if your display brightness is currently set obnoxiously high.

Pure B&W on high brightness is awesome out in broad daylight but of course terrible indoors with lights off and the same display settings.

But is that the fault of the colors?

I don’t have numbers for you, but I do have a theory on why it makes sense. Monitor contrast has been going up for years to provide better photo and video quality. The screens I used in the 90’s couldn’t do black, only a dark shade of gray. In order to achieve the same apparent level of contrast as 20 years ago, you have to use dark gray text. People who’ve been around a while will instinctively do this to achieve an outcome that feels right, and those are the people who produce these guidelines.

>The abstinence of pure black doesn't irritate me, but taking design advice from IBM does :)

It sounds vaguely like an appeal to authority suggesting that IBM is not in a position to give advice. Can you expand on that?

It's not an 'appeal to authority', just a hint that I'm reluctant to take design advice from IBM.

Why? As many other HNers have pointed out, the site that the font is being showcased on is hardly the pinnacle of good web design.

Printing websites with grey text on a laser printer usually gives you dithered and unpleasant to read text.

This should be solved with CSS media queries, e.g.

  @media print { ... }

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