When people see us slap up web pages with dark or black backgrounds, they often ask (or infer via various gestures of disgust), "Why black?!?". Some even think it's evil.

But take a look at the two columns below, courtesy of Habanero "Web Professionals", then read on. The table contains a list of the 216 hexidecimal numbers representing the whole HTML colour code range that display identically cross-platform at 8 or 32 bit color, each hex number shown in the colour it represents.

Notes:

• • 000000, which should be in the upper left position, will not show up on the black background
    
  • FFFFFF, which should be in the lower right position, will not show up on the white background

Now consider what it would be like to put in a dozen hours a day in front of glowing monitors. After about 4 hours, your eyes start to glaze over with that unmistakable, nameless film that slowly fogs over one's eyes like glaucoma and only dissipates with 4-5 hours sleep. Just getting away from the box won't do it. Washing one's eye's with water or computer eye drops does diddly squat for more than a few seconds. And there's no way we can print all we need read on these boxes.

And, aside from the desire to avoid discomfort, just check out how much clearer many more colours are on black instead of white on a computer monitor. SeeBeLow.

Which background would you choose? (My right eye aches just glancing at the white column while typing this up. But this page's time-stamp might explain that ;))

Top of Page