[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I just did a test and confirmed that every major e-commerce site I could > think of used a white background site... > > google.com > amazon.com > yahoo.com > ebay.com > > There must a reason why white is the way to go for big hit count web sites. > > Anyone know why non-white is ultra-bad idea?
I guess someone once said that pages should look like print. I think, actually, there are some changes now frequently seen. I think somebody must have decided that highest contrast can be tiring (or worse), and so they have started using dark-but-not-black on off-white. Sometimes the foreground text is far-from black. I can appreciate the concept, and do find myself getting tired or annoyed by after-images after staring at the CRT (it's 75Hz, not supposed to be so bad, eh?). However, I think it's hard to do this correctly at page creation, and often I find myself having difficulty reading the text. I have the same complaint about magazines that seem to like low contrast in "sidebars" -- I can't read those mags without turning up the light or using a magnifier! Like font size, I think there needs to be a contrast override that users can apply. Some _need_ hi-contrast, in fact. Unfortunately there is nothing resembling contrast (in say, css) presently available, short of overriding all foreground and background color attributes. Someday, maybe. Although I suspect it will always be hard to convince web authors to allow the user to select his own preferences. Aside: One could perhaps extend this discussion to gui interfaces in general. With notable exceptions (enlightenment comes to mind), many/most things in gui environments have white bg. Why was that convention changed from the opposite under the old text consoles? Regards, ..jim -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
