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Tatham Oddie
Personal blog · blog.tatham.oddie.com.auprogrammingweb
Tatham Oddie's personal blog at blog.tatham.oddie.com.au covers programming and web. Since 2011, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 10 times, most often “Why light text on dark background is a bad idea”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Tatham Oddie's 2008 post arguing that light text on a dark background is harder to read for people with astigmatism. It is cited in threads on dark themes and text readability.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Why light text on dark background is a bad idea7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2011-12-20
- Node.js on Windows2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-03-16
What Hacker News says?
The reason why many people prefer black text on white is that they have an astigmatism: http://blog.tatham.oddie.com.au/2008/10/13/why-light-text-on... I have one on the left eye but preferred white on black before I switched to Windows (from Linux), where the system colors are black on white and thus I have mostly windows with black on white open (a few dark terminal windows are extremely distracting). On the other…
Comment linking /2008/10/13/why-light-text-on-dark-background-is-a-bad-idea/
on “Design Tip: Never Use Black”Submitted Node.js on Windows as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI’m curious. Do you have links to those studies? Looking superficially, I could only find articles claiming the exact opposite – like http://blog.tatham.oddie.com.au/2008/10/13/why-light-text-on... – but they all seem to quote the same and old (1980) research.
Comment linking /2008/10/13/why-light-text-on-dark-background-is-a-bad-idea/
on “63% Prefer a Dark Themed Text Editor”Submitted How Azure AD and VS Team Services Relate to Azure Subscriptions as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI think you meant "white on black" is irritating. People with astigmatism (aproximately 50% of the population) find it harder to read white text on black than black text on white. Part of this has to do with light levels: with a bright display (white background) the iris closes a bit more, decreasing the effect of the “deformed” lens; with a dark display (black background) the iris opens to receive more light and th…
Comment linking /2008/10/13/why-light-text-on-dark-background-is-a-bad-idea/
on “Microkernels are slow and Elvis didn't do no drugs”Submitted Why light text on dark background is a bad idea as a story · 1 points
HN discussionCause astigmatism: http://blog.tatham.oddie.com.au/2008/10/13/why-light-text-on... I absolutely hate reading websites that do light on dark. I use this Chrome extension and it works great. http://www.chromeextensions.org/appearance-functioning/chang... I used to use some extension on firefox as well, can't recall the name. EDIT: Perhaps this https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/color-that-si...
Comment linking /2008/10/13/why-light-text-on-dark-background-is-a-bad-idea/
on “How I got a YC interview as a single founder and blew it at the final hurdle ”sure... you can run coffeescript on node on windows, see: http://blog.tatham.oddie.com.au/2011/03/16/node-js-on-window... And if you don't want to use vs2010, there is also gedit on windows which has support for coffeescript. As for online, what I do is I have an online coffeescript editor ( http://ace.ajax.org/ ), and when I save a file (with extension .coffee), compile it to js in the browser and save both the ori…
Comment linking /2011/03/16/node-js-on-windows/
on “Show HN: Weekend project - VS2010 CoffeeScript syntax highlighting”This seems like an interesting article, but I was only able to read a few paragraphs before all the letters got jumbled in my visual cortex and I got a headache. For the love of god, light text on a dark background is a bad idea: http://blog.tatham.oddie.com.au/2008/10/13/why-light-text-on...
Comment linking /2008/10/13/why-light-text-on-dark-background-is-a-bad-idea/
on “The Strange World Of Copyright Misconception”With astigmatism, I can't comfortably read the current light-on-dark text. http://blog.tatham.oddie.com.au/2008/10/13/why-light-text-on... Light-on-dark can be more comfortable for long-term screen reading, but a bold or heavier weighted font is really needed. I felt the original piece was effective because it really was expertly designed.
Comment linking /2008/10/13/why-light-text-on-dark-background-is-a-bad-idea/
on “This is also a web page”