"Code Sandwiches"

[Nick Sabalausky]

"David Nadlinger" <see at klickverbot.at> wrote in message 
news:ilgt04$298s$1 at digitalmars.com...
> On 3/12/11 11:34 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> "spir"<denis.spir at gmail.com>  wrote in message
>> news:mailman.2474.1299967680.4748.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
>>> On 03/12/2011 10:16 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>>>> Even with a brightness
>>>>>>   setting matching the ambient light (many people I know have turned
>>>>>> the
>>>>>>   backlight up way too high), longer blocks of white text on a dark
>>>>>>   background have the nasty habit of leaving an after-image in my 
>>>>>> eyes,
>>>>>> as
>>>>>>   demonstrated by this site:http://www.ironicsans.com/owmyeyes/.
>>>>>>
>>>> That's a very poor example of light-on-dark: It's all-bold, pure-white 
>>>> on
>>>> pure-black. Even light-on-dark fans don't do that. The "white" is
>>>> normally a
>>>> grey.
>>>
>>> It's very strange. What the text on this page explains, complaining 
>>> about
>>> light text on dark background, is exactly what I experience when reading
>>> text with the opposite combination, eg PDFs.
>>> His text holds a link that switches colors (thus suddenly displaying 
>>> black
>>> on white): this kills my eyes! I have to zap away at once.
>>>
>>
>> Yea, I have a hard time looking at that version, too. And I didn't even 
>> see
>> it until after I was away from the page for about an hour and then came
>> back.
>>
>> There are also other reasons that both versions of that page are hard to
>> read:
>>
>> - All bold.
>> - All justified (I honestly do find justified text harder to read than
>> left-algned. And the difference is much more pronounced with narrower 
>> text
>> columns, such as that page uses.)
>> - One loooong paragraph.
>
> Oh, really? I guess there is no way this site could be a fabricated 
> example for clearly demonstrating the effect, right?
>

Doesn't matter, he's still constructed a blatant strawman. Those three 
things I mentioned, plus the fact that he's using maximum contrast, all make 
text harder to read *regardless* of positive/negative contrast. And 
*despite* that, he's still using those tricks in his attempt to "prove" 
something completely different (ie, that light-on-dark is hard to 
read/look-at and shouldn't be used). It's exactly the same as if I made 
chicken noodle soup with rotted rancid chicken, tossed in some dog shit, and 
then tried to claim: "See! Chicken makes food taste terrible!" ("But you 
used bad ingredients..."  "Well excuse me for trying to clearly demonstrate 
the effect!")

Even if it weren't a strawman, it's still exaggerated and unrealistic - and 
demonstrating that an excess of something is bad does not indicate that 
ordinary usage is bad (salt and fat are perfect examples).