Blazing white (computing)

In computing, the term blazing white describes the tendency in some software packages, to put black text on a bright white background, often without the option to reverse or change the colour, or only the option to change the background colour without the actual colour of the text, which renders less than desirable results. Another common problem, is when using anti-aliasing, when a software package assumes the background colour would be white, as is currently in the Wikipedia logo.

The phenomenon seems to have originated from the metaphor of the computer screen as a page on printed media, which seems to be related to the WYSIWYG paradigm. Albeit, the effects, seem to be more similar to what one would get from printing a black page with white gaps as letters.

Where the abstraction of a computer display as a sheet of paper leaks, is most evident on CRT displays, where the display is a fluorescent light source, while a sheet of paper merely reflects the surrounding light. This is not the case with other display technologies such as LCD.

Problems that emerge are: colour bleeding , from the background into the thinner text and eye strain , due to staring into an emitting light source.

There seems to be a dispute among vision and perception researchers about whether it is actually easier or healthier to read text on dark or light background, as there is a similar dispute between users, when using each other's computer terminals.