https://christopheradams.io/ is my personal website of writing, projects, and photographs. A simple static site published with Emacs, Jekyll, and Bootstrap. I even host my own newsletter with listmonk.
I've found an agreeable middle ground, which is to keep syntax highlighting on but to use a monochrome theme, where different types of tokens (like you mention) are distinguished by contrast instead of color. However, I don't personally favor pure blacks or whites (just ask any master printer).
I do make exceptions. For example, I color my cursor, as well as highlight matching parens if the cursor is on one of the pair (changing just the foreground color of the paren, not inverting it). The only color I use is red.
I don't make any objective claims that this is better, my aim is to make something "done well and tasteful", as you say.
Nice work. If you're into this sort of thing, you might also appreciate https://instagram.com/pxlpeeps/, though the style is more constrained, and the focus is on pop culture characters.
When I read the title of the post, I wrongly assumed it linked to the "RESTful Web Services Cookbook", which is another O'Reilly classic on this topic. The advice I've heard is to read one or the other, depending on which prose style you prefer.
It's nice to see a CC-licensed effort to create a similar resource. It's unfortunate that the names are so similar.
One of its best feature is that after you select your preferences for style, width, weight, and alternates, you can bookmark the URL for later reference or sharing.
One early post that charted my path:
https://christopheradams.io/posts/2016/11/25/what-happens-wh...