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Comment by powerslave12r | Hacker News Reader

While the inverse of that (light text on dark) makes for a terrible reading experience, yet so many bloggers/sites do it.

(Funny observation: I seem to prefer dark themes for coding Python, Ruby, C and light ones for Java)

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My text editor background is pure black. I can't stand writing code on a white background for a long time. Some people uses blue backgrounds that are a lot worse.

The reason why many people prefer black text on white is that they have an astigmatism: http://blog.tatham.oddie.com.au/2008/10/13/why-light-text-on...

I have one on the left eye but preferred white on black before I switched to Windows (from Linux), where the system colors are black on white and thus I have mostly windows with black on white open (a few dark terminal windows are extremely distracting).

On the other hand, I found white/colored text on blue (as modern in the 90's, e.g. Turbo Pascal and other DOS editors/IDEs) quite readable.

Interesting link, thanks. And I notice that the site uses #222 for the text color.

I always prefer light on dark, to the extent that my Hackernews, Reddit, Google and Gmail and a few others all have user styles applied to darken them. And my terminal is light text on dark background. Not to pure black, though, even though I had never thought about why I didn't go for as dark as possible.

EDIT: Also, my window borders and Unity dock are also near black. Overall, the only white backgrounds you'll see on my desktop are the occasional "loud" website or apps that don't obey my theme settings.

I've always preferred light on dark.

Bottom line: You can't please everyone.

Set the color to "foreground" and "background", then let the browser (or viewing program) color them based on user preference.

Why is light on dark a bad reading experience? Is it just specific executions of it or in general?

I have aging eyes and find it harder to focus on white on black, also screen glare is more noticeable against a black background. It may be that because white on black is unnatural our eyes/brains have to do more work to interpret what they see.

I'm curious at your statement that white on black is unnatural.

Your observation is interesting! Do you have any insight into why that is?

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