This is a short reminder to all those hot new web designers out there:
Set a background colour on your pages!
The default background colour is not actually white. It can be set by the browser, the window manager of the user’s operating system, and a host of other ways. Assuming that it will always be white makes your sites look silly to users who customize their default colours.
Maybe this is a personal gripe, but I use a dark theme on my laptop to save battery power. The default background colour property on my windows is a dark-grey. This breaks many good-looking sites, such as a favorite: We Heart Web.
Had they taken the time to add one single property to one single tag in their CSS file, this page would look much, much better.