I'd strongly recommend against putting background-colored characters in text as a substitute for spaces. That will mess up external search engines and probably your own internal search engine. It's also a pretty huge accessibility-guidelines violation -- anyone reading the page with different colors, via a text-only browser, etc., will have a badly degraded experience. What happens if you print the page and the background color drops out, as it often the case? Suddenly you have spurious letters appearing in your text...

        $perlmonks{seattlejohn} = 'John Clyman';