Ask HN: Why did you decide to make the background a bright white color? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why did you decide to make the background a bright white color?

4 points9o1d9 comments

I remember when the first CRT monitors were around, the brightness was not enough, and it was considered normal to make a bright background to improve the contrast of the text. But now, when LCD monitors are very bright, it is harmful to make the entire screen bright.

I will make a tour into history to better understand the question. In 1990, I had a ZX Spectrum computer. It was called that because it was color, and the previous model was black and white. The computer had 8 colors, and also had a high-brightness mode, which gave 8 more colors. This palette was similar to GCI and used 4-bit RGBI palette.

You can find the CGI palette and it says that white (also called light gray) has the code #AAAAAA , and high-brightness white (HI) has the code #FFFFFF .

If you look at the source code of a web page, many sites have a background with the code #FFFFFF , that is, high brightness. In fact, the background color code should be #AAAAAA .

I propose to organize a community to explain to page authors that they cannot use the color #FFFFFF as a background, and to reduce the relevance of bright pages to search engines.

By contrast (no pun intended), HN's grey on light grey is very hard to read for me (with poor eyesight), especially in dim light. It fails accessibility best practice standards, having a contrast ratio of only 3.54:1: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/?fcolor=828282&...

Black and white may be jarring, but it's easier to turn down the brightness than to have to use a custom stylesheet just to make grey-on-grey more readable.

Are you also going to insist that The New York Times have the print equivalent of #AAAAAA?

It could get a lot worse in the HDR age where the screen has an ability, limited in time and space, to get super bright and you might have to play a video (not an image or web page glyph) to get at the ability.

The printed version has its own CSS styles.

I bought a big 43" TV a year ago to play GTA 3 and watch tutorials so I could see the text from afar. By default, the settings had dynamic brightness increase on white backgrounds, and I had to work hard to turn off dynamic brightness increase.

DarkReader will save your eyes, I'm not fond of extensions, but this one is worth it: https://darkreader.org/

It's great, not perfect, but in the vast majority of cases it works without needing any intervention. I strongly second your recommendation.

Thank you! Eight million users using this extension agree with you. So it's not a problem of one person, or screen settings. If only they knew that FFF-background is a mistake.

Ever used an iPhone or iPad?

For apps made by Apple, like Settings or Mail.app, the dominant background colors are white and light gray.

(The App Store uses more colorful backgrounds because it is trying to sell you stuff.)

Why does Apple choose those colors? Because the typical Apple user is intimidated by computers, and those are the most calming colors.

If your screen is too bright, turn it down. Don't make it everyone else's problem.

This is indeed a problem, because as I described above, it is related to a misunderstanding of color intensity. Indeed, #FFFFFF is an increased brightness of white, acceptable in limited areas of the screen, but never on the entire screen.

For example, try turning on movies on the screen, they don't use a completely bright white screen, do they?

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