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Comment by pizza | Hacker News Reader

For even more readable text, white on black. Semantically, you want to focus on the content and make the user ignore the background. But if the background (i.e. white) is visually louder (sorry for the poor wording) than the text (blackness / nothingness), it's a bad reading experience.

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White on black can create a very difficulty reading experience. It may increase the contrast, but that's not the only factor in readability.

I personally prefer light text on dark background, but never white on black. Silver an a dark blue works great for me. But font and font weight are also factors.

Because of all those factors, black text on white background is more forgiving and more broadly expected. Which is why my websites are black on white but my vim color scheme is "darkblue".

White/black is jarring, yeah. Light grey/dark grey is better most of the time. Other factors that affect readability I usually tweak are `max-width` and `font-size`, 35ems and at least 16px, respectively (except for microdata stuff which I usually keep between 12px-14px). In general, though, I prefer the content having visual focus, as opposed to the negative having focus (even though black text isn't usually described as the negative of the background).

The evidence is that black on white beats white on black.

I find that there is nothing worse than trying to read pure white on pure black.

Agreed, pure white and black are jarring. Then again, black on white is, too.

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