[dspeyer]

    color: rgb(102,102,102)

Seriously?

Why do so many publishers make their content so hard to read?

(Once I fixed that with inspectElement, the article was good.)

[JoelSutherland]

You're using chrome on windows right? The linked URL is their mobile site and the text container has been 3dtransformed forcing grayscale antialiasing which Chrome does poorly.

Check it out on Firefox or IE and you'll see what I mean.

It will look much better on a mobile device as well. If you drop "mobile." from the url you'll get their normal desktop site which also has much better type in Windows Chrome.

[dspeyer]

I'm using Firefox.

I do have some ambient light. Maybe if I replaced the curtains in my window with true blackout curtains this would look ok.

[ivank]

I'm guessing this happens when a designer has a bright LCD screen and thinks black on white has too much contrast.

[Filligree]

Which is often the case. Reading pure-black on pure-white hurts my eyes, so I often have to tune this knob the other way.

The actual problem is the lack of a brightness-controlled colorspace.

[ivank]

If it hurts your eyes, why not turn down the brightness and/or set up f.lux or redshift?

[Filligree]

I use f.lux, and it's great, but it doesn't affect brightness.

I don't want to turn down the brightness because then I've turned down the maximum brightness. My brightness tolerance runs on a curve - at one end, there's the brightness I'm okay with for the page as a whole; on the other end, there's the brightness that's okay for a single pixel, and they're nowhere near each other.

Logically, then, you should never use #FFF for large areas.

[ivank]

That's a good point, I guess I just gave up on that battle long ago.

(Well, not entirely. Games don't get my redshift color+brightness adjustments, and I used to be able to play video without the adjustments as well.)