On 28/08/17 06:07, Dimitris Chloupis wrote:
I completely agree - dark mode is great for content that you want to
look cool, but no one consumes. :-)
You assume wrong cause dark themes have been dominating GUIs for over
3 decades now.
Not really; bright on dark was only dominant in the days of the CRT
terminal when there were no "themes". (Even if you could do it as a
hardware switch, setting, say, a VT220 to black-on-white both looked
terrible as it was more an uneven gray, and tended to dim the tube more
quickly by burning in the background.)
Instead, since full bitmap graphics happened, all screen interfaces back
to Xerox's prototype office systems, then Lisa/Macintosh, and then
Windows 2.1 have been using dark type on a white background for text
work. Partly this was because of the original office metaphor, but
partly also because it was shown that it was easier (meaning, less error
prone) to read.
Here's a study that showed that participants were 26% more accurate in
reading text that way (note that "contrast reversal" on displays in
those days meant dark characters on white background):
Bauer, D., & Cavonius, C., R. (1980). Improving the legibility of visual
display units through contrast reversal.
In E. Grandjean, E. Vigliani (Eds.), Ergonomic Aspects of Visual
Display Terminals (pp. 137-142).
London: Taylor & Francis
There were other studies in the 1980s that didn't report lower errors
but instead faster reading with black on white. Academically, the
matter's pretty much considered settled - black on white is better for
most of the population, and that's on screen, not on paper. (You can
substitute any degree of light or creamy for the white, that's really a
variation of screen quality.)
The engineering workstations of the late 80s and 90s (Sun etc) used
black and white as the application default as well, with white on black
limited to console/shell windows. This was partly for consistency with
the old style, partly for easy contrast with application windows in a
multi-window environment.
Pharo was the rare exception of using a white theme. Light themes may
be popular but white are definitely not. The web is the last fort of
bright themes, but the web was and still is eons behind when it comes
to matters of UI.
Most other Smalltalks are dark-on-light by default all the way back to
Smalltalk-80 out of Xerox PARC. None of this had anything to do with
the Web, which came after, but which obviously also profits from the
same increase in readability. Rather than behind, Smalltalk was ahead
and the rest of the world followed.
The dark theme as default in Pharo I personally consider a step back. As
someone who's been busy for 25+ years defending use of Smalltalk for
real applications, a return to a primarily developer-cool presentation
instead of a user-oriented default is IMO not a plus for a language
branch that was billed as more industry-oriented (which IMO is not
exactly the same as developer-oriented). But I also understand the
desire to attract developers with the look that's currently fashionable.
That said, I wonder if the recent preference for dark among developers
(not Pharo-specific, but many languages) has to do with the rise of
widespread code highlighting. I could see how colour highlighting shows
up better on a dark background than being glared over by a white one.
Markus
