No, #FFF is white, and it's up to the client to decide what white should look like.

Arguing that we should use, say, #CCC for white, is like saying that instead of rating things out of a 100, you should rate them out of 70 instead. All you've done is narrow the scale.

#CCC is grey - one of many greys .

Nope. Nobody is talking about what colour is white, but contrast that is forced upon user that hurts eyes.

Which direction of contrast is your problem?

For me, the small contrast on pages like HN (in particular with any of the gray text) strains my eyes because it’s more effort for me to see the letters.

But I also read a reasonable amount of PDFs (black on white) which is relatively comfortable on most of my monitors (LCDs with generally low brightness setting to have less light shine into my eyes).

I think what I am saying is, I agree that what is comfortable depends on the user, so websites not moving off the defaults is better, because then users can configure what works for them.

Addendum: The low contrast example on the article is very uncomfortable to read for me.