Personally, I find light on dark to be much more readable than dark on light. My bias perhaps comes from two sources: my experience dealing with projectors, and my tendency to surf late at night.

On projected media, light colors tend to bleed into darker areas, so the dark text gets swallowed by the light background surrounding it. I especially noticed this on my high school’s large LCD (which, granted, is not run by a projector) screen, which displays announcements and such before school. People generally had difficulty reading the blue-on-yellow pages, but yellow-on-blue was always fine.

The other is a bit more subjective to lifestyle choices – when I’ve been using my computer in a darkish room, with dark-schemed terminal, editor, and everything else, a sudden switch over to a white-backgrounded website does terrible things to my pupils. Keeping everything light, to avoid that, causes undue stress on my eyes, and I get headaches and have a hard time keeping focus.

tl;dr: Some of us do it for reasons beyond fashion.

White space can be (and often is) abused, but it isn’t inherently evil. People just need to learn how to use it properly. Unfortunately, the web is not currently capable of an ideal solution, so we’ve mostly degenerated to arguing about fixed, fluid, and elastic layouts.

I could not agree more. I am constantly adjusting the font size to something I can read. Of course I have the problem of aging eyes which does not help.

My other pet peeve — whitish or light grey text on a dark background. I launch a personal crusade on the issue every time I see a web design of that nature. I know it is all the Matrix vogue to have such designs, sigh. The Wachowski brothers should be marched to Troy, Ohio, tied to a Linotype machine and shot.

the problem of how wide to users want to read should not be answered by the server–should every server know that about every user?–but by the client. it should be a browser preference.

the only problem with user ownership is user responsibility. i love using emacs (total customization of keys and macros), but i have gotten used to my webpages looking “right” with minimal effort on my part. also, sometimes the server knows more about how its website should look than the user, especially when it’s more than a blog and has specific kind of data.

Frankly I found this rant one-sided and somewhat ignorant. (And the comments are even more depressing.) Design is not making things pretty. Design is not lipstick. Design is making things work well.

The solution to sites designed with too much focus on visuals is not to renounce design altogether and party like it’s 1996.

Ted:

a web page/site should, IMHO, use all the space it is given

If every page had its own window that might be a fine argument, but tabbed browsing defeats this point. I am not going to resize my browser every time I switch a tab and not every page presents the same amount of different types of content at once (one, two, three columns, with different amounts of content, etc.). So I am going to routinely give pages more space than I would consider the ideal.

And if you wanted to make your argument honestly, you would have to argue that each site should also give every reader a way to adjust line-heigh to their preferences.

Sorry, but heaps of research on the readability of text makes a solid argument in favour of certain things that you can’t hand-wave away with a “old-media ideas in a fundamentally new medium” platitude unless you also supply new eyes and brains to go with the new medium.