Q: Who are you?
A: Read this.
Q: Why do you use white text on a black background? Don’t you know that light text on a dark background is much harder to read?
A: No. And you don’t know it either. There are a number of studies that have addressed this, and while they all report that light text on a dark background is slightly more difficult to read than dark text on a light background, it turns out that the perception that light-on-dark is difficult to read is much greater than the actual readability difference. The difficulty of light-on-dark is largely a myth. It’s my own opinion that what matters most for readability is high contrast and font choice; the slight advantage of dark-on-light can be chalked up (no pun intended) to familiarity and convention. And finally, I find light-on-dark to be easier on the eyes - staring at a white page is a lot like staring at a lightbulb.
I tend towards the scientific and the iconoclastic in all things, and so I use light text on a dark background to break with convention and increase people’s familiarity with it. If it were clearly worse; if cyan text on a yellow background were twice as readable as white on black, I’d use that instead, but it’s not.
Q: Why don’t you allow comments?
A: Because it’s my personal blog, not yours. If you have something intelligent (including well-argued disagreement) to say about something I write, post it on your blog, use the trackback URL, and it will show up on my blog. If you don’t have a blog, get one (they’re free). Accountability and traceability are key to building a reasonable, safe community where people can exchange ideas without the conversation descending into flame-wars, ad-hominem attacks, and spam.
