If your monitor is shining like a bright flashlight in your eyes, then you have your monitor's brightness turned up too high. (And/or your room's ambient lighting is too low.) A window with a white background should appear no brighter than a white piece of paper held up next to your monitor. If you use this technique to adjust the brightness of your monitor, you can read black-on-white text all day long and never get eye fatigue. I've been adjusting my displays this way for ~20 years.

I almost agree with you, but the truth is even with almost minimum brightness, I still prefer that background color get slightly darker than pure white (and same in black backgrounds: the text should not be perfect white).

Sort of like the way HN implements it. Grey or something off white tends to be easier on the eyes than pure white.

Reflective media like paper behave a little differently than emissive media like an LCD. A normal sheet of paper under normal lighting conditions won't reach the same brightness as an LCD. An LCD is much bigger than any reasonable book and it emits light uniformly across it's entire area (close to impossible for any piece of paper unless it's affixed on a flat plate). Also most paper is not actually very white.

That's the problem isn't it?

The goal of design isn't to correct the user, but to correct for the user.

> The goal of design isn't to correct the user, but to correct for the user.

But you can't solve brightness problem with just design of a web page: you can't know for sure that all of your users are in the dark, or that their monitors emit some well known amount of light. Unless, of course, you do natural selection thing by making another category of users suffer and, eventually, leave your page because of your design.

And why is it web designer's job to adapt to myriad of real world devices and conditions? Shouldn't DPIs and automatic brightness correction things in hand-held devices and other OS-side tricks handle this problem already?

Then again, what modern designers are correcting for with, say, slick hair-thin fonts? It only adds extra work: now I need to disable these fonts somehow to make page readable. That's almost like calibrating brightness with a piece of paper in the post above.

...and make everyone who has their monitors actually set to a sane brightness and contrast suffer? I'm not going to turn up the brightness (and thus decrease battery life and backlight longevity) just so I can see poorly-contrasted text that someone thought would be a good idea "to correct for the user" who should really be the one adjusting his/her badly set hardware.

I came to say almost the exact same thing. I use dark themes wherever possible, and flux when not, because backlit monitors are not print.

However, I've also started to spend more and more time on my eink Android tablet. Video is of course unwatchable, some apps refuse to launch, and scrolling is unpleasant at best. Still, I think the tradeoffs are worth it, especially late at night.

This is why I send interesting articles etc to my kindle to read. It's so much nicer reading longform stuff on eink than a laptop screen. The conversion isn't always right, but it's normally good enough.