I'm surprised how subjective this topic is. I've always looked on it as a simple matter of human physiology and physics. The eye needs contrast to pick the glyphs from the background. No contrast means no image. More contrast means a sharper image.
You can certainly argue in favor of certain color schemes. I was a green-screener in my formative years, and found that easy to read. You can also go off on variants like the Brief editor scheme that uses yellow text on a blue background. In the monochrome realm however, introduced by the MacOS and X-Windows, I honestly don't see the sense in taking a away contrast as some sort of goodwill gesture to the reader.
Finally, this practice strikes me as an attempt at some sort of poor-man's anti-aliasing/font-smoothing. Aqua text rendering is fantastic. No need to buttress it w/ CSS!
by Jim Eberle — Apr 27
You can certainly argue in favor of certain color schemes. I was a green-screener in my formative years, and found that easy to read. You can also go off on variants like the Brief editor scheme that uses yellow text on a blue background. In the monochrome realm however, introduced by the MacOS and X-Windows, I honestly don't see the sense in taking a away contrast as some sort of goodwill gesture to the reader.
Finally, this practice strikes me as an attempt at some sort of poor-man's anti-aliasing/font-smoothing. Aqua text rendering is fantastic. No need to buttress it w/ CSS!
You can test your own eyeballs here:
contrast.html