Tony Mechelynck escribió:
> On 25/01/09 02:00, Jesus Sanchez wrote:
>
>> Some time have passed since I started this thread. I will 'reuse' it to
>> discuss some things I've found on the net after some time searching
>> about the "dark on light" or "light on dark" dilema. The main points I
>> want talk are:
>>
>> o Light causes the iris to close (that's the reason for sunglasses) and
>> for long time, that muscles can stop working well and the retina start
>> recieving much more light than it should. Needless to say retina can
>> burn.
>>
>> o For people with presbytia and similars, It's easier to read on white
>> backgrounds mainly because the "iris" closes for the light and that
>> fact makes the blur dissapear. Similar to the cameras.
>>
>> o Programs for long time work like video and audio editing ones uses dark
>> themes, I think this is because some the points talked here.
>>
>> o Colors are better identified with black backgrounds when the
>> differences are few.
>>
>> o And for the end. I have seen that the planes controls are all done
>> with dark schemes (black background and white/red/green indicators),
>> could it be considered as a reason to use dark backgrounds???
>>
>> Comments are apreciated :D
>> -Jesus
>>
>
> Historically, many kinds of text terminals have succeeded one another on
> the market. The first ones had four text colours (programmed as black,
> dark grey, light grey and white, but often either actually green or
> amber), two background colours (black and "light grey") plus blink and
> underline (where underline used the same code as "blue" on colour
> terminals). On these terminals the custom was to display bright text
> ("light grey" by default) on black background, maybe because the
> opposite was (with the technology of the time) more blurry, or maybe
> because it was less economical, both in terms of power consumption and
> of monitor lifetime (since pixels which were often illuminated showed a
> "burn-in" tendency).
>
> Then came colour text terminals with either 16 foreground colours, 8
> background, and blink (to house all possibilities within a 16-bit
> "screen attribute" byte), or 16 FG, 16 BG and no blink (replacing
> blinking foreground by bold background).
>
> Further terminal improvements first concerned the number of 80-character
> lines on the screen (once colour terminals had got 80-character lines
> like the BW ones, instead of 40). The bright-on-dark tradition was kept.
>
> Then came "graphical" terminals, with a much finer colour control: 256
> colours (with no distinction between BG and FG since we're talking
> pixels here), later 16777216 and even more, though these two numbers
> were more "standard" than other values. These also had a much finer
> pixel control, with 800x600 pixels at first (instead of 80x25 to 80x60
> or sometimes -- rarely -- 132x100 characters), then successively higher
> definitions, until now lengths in excess of 1500 pixels aren't rare.
> (I'm currently using 1024x768 pixels, 16777216 colours, but it isn't the
> latest and biggest.) Pixel control meant font control, which gave rise
> to the WISYWIG fashion (What You See Is What You Get), hence the wish to
> have a page look identical on screen and on paper, which means, both on
> screen and on paper, black (or greyscale) text on white background if
> you have a greyscale printer, or primarily dark-coloured (or black) text
> on primarily bright-coloured (or white) background if your printer can
> print in colour.
>
> The above is my interpretation of why colors on text-only terminals are
> often bright-on-dark while on GUI windows it's usually the opposite. If
> you think I'm wrong, I'd like to hear how _you_ think it came about.
>
> In all the above, I intentionally didn't mention the various
> technologies which replaced one another screenwise. This doesn't mean
> that I don't know that the replacement of CRT "electron cannon"
> technology by LCD "liquid crystal" technologies made for much more
> precise control (hence smaller, less blurred pixels), reduced power
> consumption, and more elegant, less "space-hungry" flat screens -- at
> the cost of a much more complex screen microarchitecture.
>
>
> Best regards,
> Tony.
>
Very nice post, and very very complete. I agree (and think everyone also
agree) the fact that the screens today still use the "grey on black"
theme for the terminals (tty ones and VGA modes) cause the history
repercusion about this. Also looking to a VGA screen (80x25 chars) with
white background is really ugly and the low refresh rate (70 Hz I
think...) is enought low to make the blink perceptible. On GUI I think
the "What You See Is What You Get" have turned all backgrounds to white
when we all talking about light, not paper. I still have problems cause
in my house all my family use my computer and they say "white on black"
sucks, and aslo is harder to read. After some discussions they still
don't accept the fact that light to the eyes continuously can't be good.
-Jesus.
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