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Device-specific limitations and concerns should be addressed on-device rather than globally.

If a device's white is excessive then have that device correct for it. Attempting to treat special or exceptional cases as a general rule, or even the current primary modality leave you with such disasters as presuming all devices will have some fixed maximum display size (320, or 640, or 800, or 1024, or ... pixels), or refresh rates, or palettes ("Web-safe" colours, anyone), etc., etc.

We're working in a digital medium. The domain we can control is the content itself --- text, the source images, audio, etc. All of those are going to be interpreted and mediated by the devices and tools through which they're accessed.

NB: In my far-more ambitous youth, I'd have said "people can choose their own preferences. While I'd very much prefer that that capability be preserved, in the overwhelming majority of cases, people stick with defaults and won't change even the most basic of settings.* This is why both content and UI/UX designers and device manufacturers should ensure that 1) defaults are sane and that 2) automatic adjustments occur and are well-suited to circumstances.

Pixel-perfect presentation is a persistant pox on publishing predicated on ... the Web. (I ran out of Ps....)

I've railed against it for decades.

The default brightness of a monitor is optimised for looking good in a brightly-lit showroom (and also for stressing the backlight enough to ensure it fails just outside of warranty, but I digress...), not for comfortable reading in an average room.

I started with brightness and contrast set to 0 on a pair of LCDs over a decade ago, and they've only gone up to around 20 after all this time to compensate for wear.

> (I ran out of Ps....)

Predicated on poorly-picked presumptions. (On the web.)

Patently perfect!!!

> Are you 100% sure the thing you're making #000000 is the absolute darkest thing on your site/app you'll ever need to declare?

What kind of fear mongering is this? :D If I ever feel we should have made something less dark I will just change it. It's not like I signed a deal with the devil which locks me into that particular colour choice.

I understand if you ask a similarly worded question about some choice in a database schema, but colours on a UI? Fleeting like a butterfly.

Consider the following: if your design expertise was as significant as your database expertise, perhaps your view of the downstream implications of decisions in each would be more alike than not.

Downstream implications are less important in some fields than others.

Can you present an argument for your case that downstream implications in design are about as important as they are in databases instead of appeal to imaginary authority?

All the colors in a design are chosen to look good together. Changing one major color could necessitate changing all of them, and likely also icons and image assets. Even photos could be tuned to the contrast ratios of the design.

Changing things that people are used to, like colors, tends to make them upset.

If text used to be black and now it's almost black so something else could be darker, some of the customers are going to be grumpy.

Precisely. They're "just colors"? "Just integers"?

Don't hardcode integers either if you can help it.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/true

I guess my joke was not appreciated :(

if the white is blinding, isn't it because your screen is too bright?

If you force me a reduced contrast, I can't adjust. If you give me black on white, I can always set my screen at a comfortable level for me.

With reduced contrast, you also might force me to increase the brightness of my non OLED screen, which will use draw more power from my battery.

This. People use 100% screen brightness then try to compensate w/ low contrast colours.

I see a lot of colleagues messing with low-contrast color themes for their editors. I use the default Emacs one (black on white), but my screen brightness is always at around 20-30%.

I've learned the rule is to set your screen brightness _as if_ it were a piece of paper being illuminated by the ambient light.

I hope to someday find a viable e-ink monitor. :)

Maybe not blinding but not pleasant. Keeping brightness in check is something I do often but I doubt many people do — notice how bright everyones devices are in public next time you're in a restaurant or theater.

I'm with you that you want high contrast, but you also want balance. I think the #000 on #FFF of this textarea I'm in works because the leading is tight, the kerning is appropriate… its information dense. The NYT website is information dense.

If I squint and I see a grayish blob I feel like good decisions were made. If I still see mostly white then there's work to be done.

I've always been of the opinion that if you find a completely white screen to be blinding or even painful, then you either need to turn down your brightness or add additional ambient light to your room, or both.

A lot of screens are too bright even at 0% even at night. My LG 4K screen is such an example, I work on 0% during the day with 70% contrast and it's just about ok.

During the night it's wayy too bright though and I need to reduce contrast to almost 0% which helps but kills colour depth.

Screen manufacturers optimise for high brightness way too much. I guess because it looks good on the shop floor.

In summer I often work with the windows open at night but the lights off to avoid attracting bugs. All my displays are horrible in this scenario. Except my old amber vt520 which I can set so low I can barely read it in a dark room, or so bright it is easily readable in sunlight. It also has amazingly convenient brightness and contrast dials instead of a frustrating OSD menu. Some display qualities of CRTs have still not been matched.

> Screen manufacturers optimise for high brightness way too much. I guess because it looks good on the shop floor.

Or it's because they don't expect anyone to sit and compute in an unlit room.

And HDR content can look really good if you have a high peak brightness.

I'd use comfortable lights and window screens myself.

Not really, like I said I use my 4K at 0% brightness in a sunlit room and it's just right. So even there I have no adjustment options anymore without compromising colour depth. When I have artificial lights on I already need to reduce contrast substantially.

My unlit room thing is only in summer, as I live in Spain and have no AC I need to have the windows open at night. It's pretty extreme and I understand that screens are not made with that in mind but they should handle a normal evening scenario just fine.

Most of the apps text editors etc. I use are in dark mode. So yes, my screen brightness is set to above 50%. When I switch to a white-background page I get instantly blinded.

You might like an extension such as Dark Background with Light Text.

Another tool that might help: zooming texts so you don't need them so bright in dark mode. It might help reduce eye fatigue too.

What's blinding when it fills the whole screen might not be blinding if it was used in moderation.

For example, take this photograph: https://monovisions.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/10-famous...

There is pure #fff in that photograph, but it's used very sparingly, so the overall picture is still pretty dark.

https://hypertele.fi/temp/gin3r0fe2rb9feqb9ufe90iun.png

You are correct, there's very little pure black and white in the photo. Only a handful of pixels.

> Are you 100% sure the thing you're making #000000 is the absolute darkest thing on your site/app you'll ever need to declare?

Assuming you have a well-managed CSS architecture, you could use black for the darkest thing on your site now and change it later if it absolutely becomes necessary! I don't quite follow the logic of not using pure black now because you might need it in the future, since that same argument will apply just as much at that future time! Besides, there are only 256 shades of neutral gray (black #000000 to white #FFFFFF), so even if your "black" background is #333333 one could still argue "Are you 100% sure there won't be more than 50 darker shades of grey on your site you'll ever need to declare?"

> * Conversely, never use white! Modern macOS sucks at this! A large window of Mail.app in light mode is pretty blinding. What if you want to add a subtle highlight to a button border on a white background? #fafafa was always a go-to white for me because its easy to remember.

I always thought the grey window backgrounds used by the Classic Mac OS Platinum appearance were great for this. Bright enough to not be dingy and depressing like the more middle-greys used by Win9x, but dark enough to not be blinding, and also dark enough to use actual black for text to maintain high contrast ratios.

Platinum was designed at the height of CRTs, which were considerably brighter and higher contrast compared to the LCDs that followed them — even run of the mill budget CRTs outperformed the average early LCD, and consumer LCDs didn’t really catch up for a good 10-15 years after CRTs went out of style (in some aspects, LCDs are still playing catch-up). I wonder how much the hardware was responsible for shaping screen content design trends.

A colleague who's a CSS wizard was working on a site where a defined colour in SCSS was "black" and it was #333333. He added a darker black at #222222, and then didn't call it "dark_black" and I've never forgiven him.

Could have been blackblack or blacker. Leaves room for the next level to be blackblackblack or blackest.

1) darker_blackblackest vs 2) darkest_blackblack, vote for the one closer to #000, GO!

There's VantaBlack for that...

That face when somebody decides it’s easier to reassign the VantaBlack var from #000 to #111, and later somebody needs a different #000

Inb4: “We can't use #000000 because we don't have a license for VantaBlack.”

Blackadder maybe.

blacker_than_the_blackest_black_times_infinity

What a missed opportunity.

How does a software engineer pass up the opportunity to reference either Spinal Tap or Douglas Adams?

>* It's basic floor/ceiling stuff. Once you go #000000, you can't go any darker. Are you 100% sure the thing you're making #000000 is the absolute darkest thing on your site/app you'll ever need to declare?

That's kind of like in BASIC incrementing line numbers by 10 instead of one so you can more easily add lines that you will eventually realize are needed to be shoehorned in.

> * Conversely, never use white! Modern macOS sucks at this! A large window of Mail.app in light mode is pretty blinding. What if you want to add a subtle highlight to a button border on a white background? #fafafa was always a go-to white for me because its easy to remember.

Yes this is why I love dark modes these days. So many apps totally overdo it with the white. MacOS indeed but also pretty much all Google apps and sites are light gray on white. It's too blinding and I can't reduce my screen brightness as I'm already at 0% during the day. Screen manufacturers are now optimising for high brightness that stands out in the shop but ignore low levels.

And so I reduce my contast as the only option but it reduces colour depth too much.

Dark modes are not a perfect option either because they make the apps that don't support it be ultra bright in comparison.

But either way it starts with misguided design principles from Apple and Google IMO. The old Grey window fabric of windows 2000 was boring but it really balanced things out.

I much prefer managing my own contrast levels. Always have.

The product of all these attempts to do things for people results in a mess. It's one of those, "if only everyone would..." scenarios. Fact is they just won't.

All that said, leaving some room makes sense. That's likely in the median of the mess and not contributing to it all that much.

macOS doesn't suck at all. It's the device performance being exemplary and people not realizing what that means that sucks.

> A large window of Mail.app in light mode is pretty blinding.

Honestly, if that is the case then the display is set much too bright.

This site uses white (on the sides). Does that bother you? Seems fine to me.

My preferred custom CSS for HN swaps the page background and text-area colours.

Give me black-on-white for text.

(It's also annoying on e-ink, as you might expect.)