Isn't it time for a high-dynamic range computing or web standard?

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I sometimes bemoan the fact that there's no widespread support for high dynamic range on the web or in computing in general.



The white that most new LCD panels are capable of producing is way, way too bright in most lighting environments to be used as a background color. It's like staring into the sun (ok, not really). And yet, what color is the background of 75% or more of all web sites?



The only practical solution is to run your panel at a brightness close to 0 and sacrifice that great contrast ratio to save your eyes from burning destruction.



The closest thing I've seen to a general-purpose answer to this problem is Compiz's support for dynamically adjusting the brightness and contrast of particular windows. So you could set, say, every instance of a Firefox window to have reduced maximum brightness and use a dark desktop theme. Now you can turn your panel brightness up so you get some real contrast.



This is not a perfect solution of course because it affects the entire window unilaterally. Ideally, you'd have a way to say "any idiot who makes the background color of the website white should have it changed to a medium grey, but darker photographs should be allowed to have brighter than medium grey highlights." Otherwise you are just back to wasting the dynamic range the panel is capable of.



You might be able to get close to this ideal with stylesheet overrides, but they wouldn't work in every situation unless there was some sort of a standard. And of course you're messing with the designers' intentions which is less than ideal.



You could think of an ideal solution as a ReplayGain for the web. But instead of adjusting the maximum amplitude of the sound, we're adjusting the maximum amplitude of your site's luminance.



I doubt anything like this will become popular unless the LCD panel manufacturers get the ball rolling. Until then, we'll just keep chugging along with them turned down to the minimum possible brightness. Except for the people who don't even realize this is a problem, and stare into a bright lamp all day in their dark office. But unfortunately there is no hope for those folks.