[ry_ry]

Almost very designer I've worked with has eschewed black in favour of one of the lower order grays, not just to make the contrast less jarring but also to ease the browser's own font smoothing a little as it tries to jump from 0 to 255.

[cpeterso]

You could probably get a similar effect by softening the background color from a harsh #FFF. You might not need to use as light of gray text color then.