Readability

Occasionally some friends of mine will complain about my choice in colors on this site, or the lack of graphics, or the overabundance of text. First, this survey states “the most readable color combination is black text on white background and overall, there is a stronger preference for any combination containing black.” The key for me is readability. This site is about storing information. Almost all of that information comes in the form of text. The common way of retrieving that information is by reading that text. Thus, I make the text black, on a white background, to make it easier to retrieve.

Second, I’m really impressed that you know Flash and CSS and Java and XML. That’s really cool. However, I don’t use much of it here, because big swoopy windows with popups, blinky lights and a soundtrack isn’t going to make the information contained on these pages any easier to retrieve. If it did, I’d use it.