User:Xiong/Background

Support off-white as a sitewide background color for mainspace. On my own MediaWiki wiki, I've set  as the background color for all pages and it does a great deal to lessen eyestrain. Indeed, I've set a similar background color in my email client and text editor.

This is not a user-specific issue, although some users may complain while others suffer silently. Did you ever wonder why slide rules are yellow? Light of different colors is refracted differently by a lens, for example that in the human eye; this is chromatic aberration. People with entirely normal eyesight will see a slightly blurred image when black text is displayed on a pure white background. This is true even when the display is homogenous, such as ink on paper. A lightly colored background reduces this effect.

Some people may feel less annoyed by chromatic abberation than others but then, there are people who are comfortable reading a book next to an operating jackhammer. That's not an argument against quiet living rooms. Nor should we expect casual readers to tinker with technical details; the project should be as presentable as possible, by default.

The current fashion of black-on-white pages is in part a reaction against the excesses of the early web, with magenta text on animated GIF backgrounds; in part it is related to the demand for white kitchens, white carpets, white sugar, and Wonder Bread -- the perceived superiority of pure whiteness. We're coming to realize that white homes are hard to keep clean and white foods hard to digest. We should also realize that white web pages are hard to read.

&mdash; Xiong &#29066; talk * 12:19, 13 September 2008 (UTC)