Body Tags

Recently I made a change to my web browser's configuration to make body tag-less pages more pleasing to my eye. I set them to use grey for my text color, a greenish cyan for my unvisited link color, and a blueish purple for my visited link color, all on a black background. You've seen those before, I'm sure... I use them all the time. Actually, I'll change the body tag of this page to match so you can get the full effect (I don't do this very often cuz I like my pages to be consistant). I discovered something very interesting when i did this:

People don't know how to use body tags correctly.

There are many many sites out there that define a white or light background... and nothing else. This presents a big problem for people like me who don't care much for the glaring black-on-white look. Allow me to illustrate:

If you select this radio button:

you will see how these pages look to me. Not too easy to read, is it? Now select this one:

to get back to something readable.

You see the problem? And it's not just HTML amateurs who do this. There are a lot of professional sites as well. And HTML editors do it; I recently downloaded Dreamweaver to try it out based on an ad that said it won't mess up your code (and it doesn't; I was amazed). Unfortunately, their default page has a body tag of <body bgcolor="white"> or something of that nature. Uhm, hello? It's not very professional to make something that doesn't work with all user settings.