Answer:
I am advocating for the use of a grey background instead of the traditional white background colour for a couple of reasons (mainly to do with reducing the glare from reading on certain devices and also to highlight active fields for pages with lots of form input), but it seems like people have a preference for white background because it is 'standard'.
I am wondering if there's any way to determine the shade of grey that you can use which is light enough to mimic the cleanness of the plain white colour, but still provide enough contrast that it can be distinguished when juxtaposed to a plain white screen element (e.g. input field).
Explanation: