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It’s a very common theme for people to implement something that they personally don’t use, but with problems so that the end result for the people that do want
by chrismorgan 5y ago
It’s a very common theme for people to implement something that they personally don’t use, but with problems so that the end result for the people that do want to use it is worse than if they hadn’t done anything.
Accessibility is a good example of this, so that, for the web, the ARIA Practices document starts with a big warning, “no ARIA is better than bad ARIA”—because in general if you don’t touch ARIA stuff everything will still be there and usable, but it’s easy to mess everything up if you set things in the wrong way (but you can’t really put guard rails in without crippling the functionality for those cases where it is desired).
Dark modes can be added by browser extensions like Dark Reader, and it’s not frightfully uncommon for it to do a better job than the author—on this site, for example, Dark Reader would handle the code highlighting properly, where the author neglected to. (Would it have handled the glitch background thing? I haven’t tried it, but from past experience of how it works I think it would have caught at least the CSS one, but I’m not sure what it would have done with the SVG one at all.)
- stavros 5y agoHmm, I don't see how a bad optional stylesheet is worse than no stylesheet. Sure, the ARIA stuff might be, but those aren't optional. At worst, you can just not use the light stylesheet.
- chrismorgan 5y agoSee the result in this page: dark mode users were presented something broken that completely ruined the main effect of the article, where it wasn’t immediately obvious why it was broken, and which they can’t easily switch away from; whereas if it had done nothing they would have received something admittedly inferior in an important way (light) but functional, by default, and if they use Dark Reader, something superior and functional.
- jakub_g 5y agoPersonally I prefer people to provide dark themes themselves. Dark Reader seemed to be CPU hungry last time I tried, and it would entirely crash some pages even.
- nightpool 5y agoThe problem is that it's not just an optional stylesheet, it's enabled by default for everyone who uses dark mode on the OS level, with no easy way to opt back out except by changing a global system-wide setting—a casual user probably wouldn't even notice that there are two potential themes!