>Ideally though pure white background should be avoided
I can buy into eye fatigue from the background being mostly arctic white (#FFFFFF) such as a fullscreen Notepad text editor. This can be especially annoying when one has a 31" monitor -- it's like having a giant 31" lightbulb shining into one's eyes.
However, I still don't see any evidence that the text color of #000000 causes eye strain.
HN'rs... try this:
go to "sarahwerner.net" (the webpage of this thread)
In Google Chrome press F12 for Inspector
Right-click on one of the grey paragraphs and select "Inspect element"
In the "Styles" tab, press "+" to add a new css rule
The new rule is "p { color : black; }"
In Chrome, it lets you use your mouse to click a checkbox to dynamically toggle that rule
You should also see that the values properties pane to toggle from "rgb(68,68,68)" to "rgb(0,0,0)"
(Modify those instructions for Firefox, Safari, etc.)
Keep in mind that GIF demo is 8-bit color not 24-bit so you must do the experiment yourself to get an accurate comparison.)
Experiment with toggling back & forth and see if you suffer the "eye strain" when it flips to #000000 that some folks are talking about.
Personally, I think #000000 looks more readable because even though the sarahwerner.net's background is #FFFFFF (pure white), it doesn't "feel" like pure white because she has large elements on webpage such as photos and screenshots. My guess is that the eye "averages" out the entire background to be a "light grey" even though the underlying RGB value is pure white.
You might be right about #000 on white not causing eye strain any more than grey on white.
The grey font on sarahwener.net is more pleasing (to me) because I associate eye fatigue with overly contrasty page environments. Looking again, it really is the Merriweather font I like most about the text. The lighter grey colour is less to do with it.
White text on black on the other hand as I mentioned, it causes shimmering. It's hard to speed-read. Harsh white text on pure black will challenge your eyes after a few pages. I've been on the receiving end of user complaints about this very thing. We changed it to off white text and brought the black up slightly and everyone agreed it looked better.
As you say, bright white screens are lightbulbs shining in our eyes. Personally, it's the white backgrounds that hurt my eyes both on large monitors and reading web pages at night on my tablet. I even have a greasemonkey script that "fixes" this on some regular sites I visit such as Google. I don't touch my monitor brightness because I need it to be accurate for photoshop etc.
I can buy into eye fatigue from the background being mostly arctic white (#FFFFFF) such as a fullscreen Notepad text editor. This can be especially annoying when one has a 31" monitor -- it's like having a giant 31" lightbulb shining into one's eyes.
However, I still don't see any evidence that the text color of #000000 causes eye strain.
HN'rs... try this:
(Modify those instructions for Firefox, Safari, etc.)(Here's an animated gif showing what the F12 experiment looks like: http://i.imgur.com/mmfKIjW.gif
Keep in mind that GIF demo is 8-bit color not 24-bit so you must do the experiment yourself to get an accurate comparison.)
Experiment with toggling back & forth and see if you suffer the "eye strain" when it flips to #000000 that some folks are talking about.
Personally, I think #000000 looks more readable because even though the sarahwerner.net's background is #FFFFFF (pure white), it doesn't "feel" like pure white because she has large elements on webpage such as photos and screenshots. My guess is that the eye "averages" out the entire background to be a "light grey" even though the underlying RGB value is pure white.