5 ms·

Honestly if the goal is a website as simple as possible, dark mode should not belong there at all. We've had simple readable websites in 90s long before the dar

by SPBS 3y ago

Honestly if the goal is a website as simple as possible, dark mode should not belong there at all. We've had simple readable websites in 90s long before the dark mode fad was a thing, only having light mode is fine. > Third, this binary toggle is a bad way to implement dark mode because it ignores system/browser settings, so if a user has, say, enabled dark-mode on their smartphone OS, they still get served light-mode until they manually enable it; note that some systems change it based on local time/ambient light too, which is quite nice... if websites & apps respect it instead of overriding it. There's so much complexity here that goes against the philosophy of a simple website if simplicity is the goal. They should just skip dark mode entirely. HN itself is perma light mode, it doesn't stop me from reading it at night.

grogenaut 3y ago
hn isn't pure white and it does kill me at night on powerful monitors... just like I can't do dark mode outside on a laptop. Sure we did readable websites in the 90s, on dialup or slow dsl, and they took forever to load on small monitors. We also didn't have USB or SSDs. Dark mode and light mode is a nice tradeoff for varied lighting conditions.
- SPBS 3y ago
  Well I don't really mean white, but more of pick a default theme that works in both day and night and stick with it. So that it's all kept very simple. You could use a dark theme as the default as well, but light mode tends to be more accessible in more situations so I prefer light over dark. As an example, I think the Solarized Light palette is pretty usable in all situations.
- simondotau 3y ago
  If you have ergonomic issues with mostly white screens, it should be the job of your operating system or web browser to police this. It wouldn’t be difficult to implement a feature that sets a maximum total luminance for each page. Perhaps even automatically inverting the colours if it’s over a certain threshold.
  - Tomte 3y ago
    > If you have ergonomic issues with mostly white screens ...you need to turn your display brightness way down! Hold a piece of white paper next to your display. Open a window with white background. Is the window/display brighter than the piece of paper? It's too bright. It depends on the display of course, but just as an example: my brightness setting is at 2 out of 100. At the work computer it's 19 out of 100.
  - nogridbag 3y ago
    I've been using Chrome's experimental "Dark Theme" feature on Android for months primarily for reading HN at night. It works great for HN, but occasionally it renders other websites completely unusable.
- re-thc 3y ago
  > and it does kill me at night on powerful monitors Are they powerful or misconfigured? Something is wrong if the screen hurts your eyes, no matter the colors.
vintagedave 3y ago
Why would simple avoid dark mode? It respects the user's preferences. My site uses CSS to respect light/dark theme, so has no manual toggle. (A manual toggle requires Javascript and I have a personal goal to have a JS-free site, just pure HTML and CSS.) It was quite simple to do: just a media query and setting a few colours. I also think that a site should respect the user's own light/dark settings, and so a toggle, if one ever exists for a site, should really be a browser setting on the browser toolbar. I don't know of a browser that does this, yet.
gwern 3y ago
'Simple' is always relative to requirements. Otherwise, you'd just be sending 80-col ASCII textfiles down the wire (or something even simpler than that, like nothing at all). Is dark-mode a good requirement? I'm not sure. It's nice to have, and our dark-mode does look great on a recent smartphone in the dark - but if I had known just how hard a good dark-mode would be, and how many of the issues we would struggle with (issues which OP runs headlong into), I think we would've skipped it. There's a lot of other things that time & energy could go into. For most websites, I would say that they have far too many problems to spend time on dark-mode, no matter how trendy dark-mode is. (Users who really want dark-mode can install one of many extensions/plugins/apps/screen-inversion tools. They work reasonably well, and usually avoid issues like the white-flash FOUC.)

by SPBS 3y ago

grogenaut 3y ago

hn isn't pure white and it does kill me at night on powerful monitors... just like I can't do dark mode outside on a laptop. Sure we did readable websites in the 90s, on dialup or slow dsl, and they took forever to load on small monitors. We also didn't have USB or SSDs. Dark mode and light mode is a nice tradeoff for varied lighting conditions.

SPBS 3y ago
Well I don't really mean white, but more of pick a default theme that works in both day and night and stick with it. So that it's all kept very simple. You could use a dark theme as the default as well, but light mode tends to be more accessible in more situations so I prefer light over dark. As an example, I think the Solarized Light palette is pretty usable in all situations.
simondotau 3y ago
If you have ergonomic issues with mostly white screens, it should be the job of your operating system or web browser to police this. It wouldn’t be difficult to implement a feature that sets a maximum total luminance for each page. Perhaps even automatically inverting the colours if it’s over a certain threshold.
- Tomte 3y ago
  > If you have ergonomic issues with mostly white screens ...you need to turn your display brightness way down! Hold a piece of white paper next to your display. Open a window with white background. Is the window/display brighter than the piece of paper? It's too bright. It depends on the display of course, but just as an example: my brightness setting is at 2 out of 100. At the work computer it's 19 out of 100.
- nogridbag 3y ago
  I've been using Chrome's experimental "Dark Theme" feature on Android for months primarily for reading HN at night. It works great for HN, but occasionally it renders other websites completely unusable.
re-thc 3y ago
> and it does kill me at night on powerful monitors Are they powerful or misconfigured? Something is wrong if the screen hurts your eyes, no matter the colors.

vintagedave 3y ago

Why would simple avoid dark mode? It respects the user's preferences. My site uses CSS to respect light/dark theme, so has no manual toggle. (A manual toggle requires Javascript and I have a personal goal to have a JS-free site, just pure HTML and CSS.) It was quite simple to do: just a media query and setting a few colours. I also think that a site should respect the user's own light/dark settings, and so a toggle, if one ever exists for a site, should really be a browser setting on the browser toolbar. I don't know of a browser that does this, yet.

gwern 3y ago

'Simple' is always relative to requirements. Otherwise, you'd just be sending 80-col ASCII textfiles down the wire (or something even simpler than that, like nothing at all). Is dark-mode a good requirement? I'm not sure. It's nice to have, and our dark-mode does look great on a recent smartphone in the dark - but if I had known just how hard a good dark-mode would be, and how many of the issues we would struggle with (issues which OP runs headlong into), I think we would've skipped it. There's a lot of other things that time & energy could go into. For most websites, I would say that they have far too many problems to spend time on dark-mode, no matter how trendy dark-mode is. (Users who really want dark-mode can install one of many extensions/plugins/apps/screen-inversion tools. They work reasonably well, and usually avoid issues like the white-flash FOUC.)