Wikipedia is rolling out dark mode support

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Accessibility_for_reading

by brylie • 2 years ago

41 57 2 years ago

wruza3• 2 years ago

I believe at this point dark mode should be treated as an accessibility feature and built right into browsers and css hints. Until that, just use DarkReader extension with suitable settings. It can change brightness, contrast, saturation and plays well with syntax coloring etc. Screws up only a few sites where you can turn it off on per-site basis. No in-site dark mode does that, and dark modes are often even more toxic than bright modes.

michelb• 2 years ago

How many non-tech people actively choose dark mode?

deafpolygon• 2 years ago

And how many can't really use it because of accessibility and vision issues?

wruza3• 2 years ago

How many non-tech sites do have it?

Editing incorrect argument: More importantly, how many allow setting a specific contrast instead of just “dark mode” as-is.

vladvasiliu• 2 years ago

Judging by what I see at work, where people seem to use dark mode during daytime in teams, outlook and others, which isn’t the default AFAIK, I’d say quite a fair bit.

beardyw• 2 years ago

I (tech) hate dark mode. My wife (very non tech) uses it.

xxs5• 2 years ago

My daughter does, and she is a rare example. I consider it a waste of time/resources. Brings me back to black/green displays.

LorenzoGood• 2 years ago

Most people younger than 20 that I know except myself exclusiveley use dark mode.

xign• 2 years ago

The reason why this is tricky to do is that websites have custom designs. It's not a trivial problem to make a dark mode version of the design. You can't just flip the colors. There are design work in making sure your design works well in both dark and light modes. Most automatic dark mode solutions don't usually work across the board.

saagarjha• 2 years ago

I get that this is cool and all but I just wish they didn’t have to tell me with a modal every time I open a page :(

_ZeD_• 2 years ago

I might be at a loss here, but I cannot use dark-themed webpages. They are totally blurred and unreadable for me... My only hope is that light-themed documents will be kept

tass• 2 years ago

Astigmatism? I have a minor one but points of light on a dark background is the best way to see it.

explaininjs2• 2 years ago

I’ve had astigmatism ever since a laser eye surgery. It’s unnoticeable 95% of the time, but every site that forces dark mode on me makes it immediately obvious. I immediately find a light switch or leave.

wruza3• 2 years ago

That’s because everyone is different and one guys dark mode is another guys eye horror. Sites implementing some dark mode is like public places implementing some accessibility as they see it, with different ideas in every place.

Dark mode should be a set of settings tuned to every user, like glasses. Not a designer’s hallucination about matrix and hackers.

As a matter of fact, I’d like to have similar settings for bright mode as well. Cause designs get out of hand in both modes.

genocidicbunny• 2 years ago

If you haven't had your vision checked recently, might be a good idea to do so because it sounds like you may have astigmatism.

I've been slowly developing it as I get older and one of the most noticeable effects to me is that bright objects on dark backgrounds are becoming blurrier over time. It's most noticeable with lights when driving at night, but I've started to notice it when using dark mode without any additional lighting in the room.

mg3• 2 years ago

I still think dark mode should be a browser feature. Not a feature of every website.

In a broader sense, the whole design of a site could be selectable via the browser. Similar to how CSS Zengarden works:

https://www.csszengarden.com

But with layouts that are stored on the user's computer and applicable to every website.

tkzed49• 2 years ago

CSS zen garden worked because you had people writing different styles for a single HTML document. How would you write styles for every site? Sure CSS does colors, but it also does a lot of other stuff that isn't easily transferrable between websites.

chris_wot2• 2 years ago

HTML that uses sane markup, ids and classes goes along way towards making CSS skinnable.

lukan• 2 years ago

There are extensions like dark reader and I use them.

But you cannot just flip colors - pictures for example have to fit their background, for not breaking style.

mg3• 2 years ago

Me too, although I use bookmarklets instead of extensions.

A bookmarklet can change images too.

We would just have to decide on an algorigthm for the images.

For example here on HN - the algo could detect the similarity between the orange in the title bar and the orange in the Logo. And change the logo accordingly.

Or the site could add some semantic info on how the colors should behave.

marginalia_nu2• 2 years ago

I dunno, seems kinda weird we've decided that Light Mode and Dark Mode are the Two Themes and every website must be made to support them.

Why can't we just have full on theme support? We've had this before on many websites.

suslik• 2 years ago

Or even an OS-level feature like it currently is on MacOS. It is very convenient to change the mode globally and have all your apps, including browser, IDE, email, etc. change as well.

kalium-xyz3• 2 years ago

We could have saved a fortune in electricity if dark mode was a default and as a standard rolled out decades ago across everything.

One of my old CS teachers would rant about googles evil choice of white background.

marginalia_nu2• 2 years ago

It's my understanding that most monitor types (except CRT and OLED) are literally just a filter over an always-on white backlight. Is this not correct, or is the light somehow re-absorbed and turned back to energy?

mjevans2• 2 years ago

It's more nuanced than that.

Modern displays do use a backlight, but might not drive it at full brightness for mostly not-white displays.

arp2422• 2 years ago

Unfortunately some people will bring up these kind of topics no reasonable person is against (climate change, racism, accessibility, etc.) to support their pre-conceived notion, whether it makes sense or not. We might call this "playing the climate change card".

kalium-xyz3• 2 years ago

CRT was universally used in the past. And backlights are dimmed when displaying black most of the time. You can test your power usage of displays yourself if for some reason you dont believe this.

xxs5• 2 years ago

We could have saved a fortune in electricity if dark mode was a default and as a standard rolled out decades ago across everything.

How - you need an OLED display for this to be a thing, The ones with backlight (well the extreme vast majority) prevent the light from going through.

One of my old CS teachers would rant about googles evil choice of white background.

That's awkward - get a display and measure the input current with different modes.

system2• 2 years ago

I've been using Dark Reader for a long time and even donated for their amazing work. It is my favorite Chrome Extension by a large margin.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/dark-reader/eimadpb...

mg3• 2 years ago

When I want to use a site in darkmode, I always use this code as a bookmarklet:

    s=document.createElement('style');
    s.textContent=`
        * {
            color: #2c2 !important;
            background: #222 !important;
            font-family: arial !important;
        }
    `;
    document.head.appendChild(s);

I use a lot of bookmarklets, so I wrote a tool to convert clean code to bookmarklets and vice versa:

https://www.gibney.org/bookmarklet_editor

WithinReason• 2 years ago

There is also this:

https://github.com/dolegi/222

But widgets like this don't work as well as native support

sva_• 2 years ago

Seems to cause issues with black SVG pictures for now

Like in this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopf_bifurcation

xigoi• 2 years ago

This is why SVGs with a transparent background should use currentColor rather than black.

spleen• 2 years ago

Yes, this and some maps are not dark-mode ready, so had to revert.

fsflover2• 2 years ago

Wikipedia is rolling out dark mode support

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