Thank you! Are there any other things I can add to tell the browser, “just do what’s best for the user, and don’t worry about breaking my other styles, because I don’t have any, because I don’t know what’s best for the user”?
I could say “please don’t make me turn my screen brightness all the way up” in the same vein - dark-mode only websites are borderline unreadable for some people, and in my experience, about 80% of websites that I visit that don’t respect my browser’s selected color scheme (via prefers-color-scheme) are dark-mode only, with a simple CSS override leaving me with white-on-white text. It goes both ways 🤷
I use both light and dark modes on a frequent basis.
I have a lot of floaters in my eyes, so tend to prefer dark modes as it makes for a less distracting reading environment.
On the other hand, when I present in class light mode is much more legible on the projector. (Which lowers brightness with a lot of dark) I also prefer bright mode in bright locations, such as outside.
There are values to both sides, and while the title of the post is a bit accusatory, the content is important but not enough. I encourage people on both sides to consider the value of the other, and to ensure that the experience is good for those in both camps.
And so we have moved from ‘no such thing as themes/modes’ to ‘a nice feature some users appreciate’ to ‘not offering this feature is SWATting your users’.
I realise we’re on the internet, but this seems a bit of an uncharitable interpretation?
The author’s offering an actual solution to a problem that some people have. I didn’t see any discussion as to the moral rectitude of dark vs light mode.
I will admit I never really considered dark mode to be an accessibility feature until receiving a request for dark mode on app that was going to be used in darkened industrial control rooms. For some people, it really is important.
It’s not that easy. If you setup a whole theme you have to change a lot more. If you have images, they will still have white background. If you use SVGs (to scale it better, hello fellow 4k users, “please don’t blurry me”), then you probably have black lines on black background now.. There are tons of other tiny things that can break, and I don’t expect people who actually just write some blogs to test this for every configuration.
This is absolutely true and is why personally I’m not a user of custom styles (who has the time?). But it’s a start, if you acknowledge that it’s not the intended use and may have mixed results.
Maybe ship the CSS of your choice and let your browsers reader-mode take over from there for all the custom requirements of others ? Otherwise I’ll probably just default to no CSS, so it looks like disabling CSS completely. And even that won’t work very well if you need colors for Code highlighting.
Not particularly…in many computer games, notably the Counter-Strike series, a flashbang was implemented with a bright white flash that fades. (At LAN parties, you could always tell a successful flash by the CRT lighting up an opponent’s face and the wall behind them. Good fun.)
I figured the author was alluding to that big white flash upon switching to a new web page that did not handle that dark mode preference gracefully.
People tend not to sugarcoat unpleasant things. When I was asking support of a brokerage service/website about their plans on adding dark mode, I described their then-super-bright website just as it felt: that it resembles an interrogation when I’m using it in the evening.
Got a chuckle from the support person. They suggested using browser addon but added dark mode some time later anyway.
Because the title of the post is just as inflammatory (in wording as well) and everyone vibes with this response. If someone doesn’t like how a website looks then I’d suggest using an extension to force it instead of asking politely through a setting that may or may not be supported. dark reader seems decent.
Flashbangs are typically used by SWAT teams when entering premises occupied by possibly hostile individuals. This isn’t that much of a reach tbh. I don’t see why it bothers you so much considering the OP was just as tongue in cheek. It’s web stuff, barely technical, the post has already been flagged a bunch, and the responses reflect the effort.
No reason to expend a ton of energy here, gonna go play with stable diffusion.
because upvote-based discussion boards create positive feedback loops for reactionary paranoia and every forum of that structure devolves over time to produce the same type of discussion structure and lenses on how to interpret content. reddit, HN, lobsters, digg before it … this evolution happens over and over and then someone goes “i know, i’ll fix this by making a new community with better moderation” instead of questioning the fundamental voting structure that underpins every one of these doomed communities.
I’m not at all convinced voting is the right model, because the people that don’t know about a topic vastly outnumber the people that do know about a topic. Maayyyyybe a pagerank-adjusted system but that has a huge bootstrapping problem, I’m not sure how you’d get that off the ground. Voting isn’t really the goal anyway, the goal is good discussion.
Opening a white webpage while using darkmode feels just like getting hit with a flashbang in a first-person shooter. That’s how I understood the title, and as a darkmode user and Counterstrike player myself, I fully relate to that description. The analogy doesn’t sound inflammatory at all. In fact, it’s quite accurate.
I can only speak for myself, but I upvoted the parent comment because I feel that the submission doesn’t bring anything to the table other than its baity title. It looks like the work of less than a minute. Measured, descriptive, non-sensationalized post titles are an important aspect of Lobste.rs for me.
The comment in question has most of the same problems as the story itself, so I don’t exactly love it, but shrug.
Unfortunately that’s only in theory. In practice there will be non-negligible amount of websites that assume black-on-white defaults and break (e.g. black on black text) if they aren’t.
I use Dark Reader as most of a solution to this problem, but every now and then there is a webpage that wants to be light so bad that even that doesn’t work.
It was actually pretty easy to implement what the author was recommending on my website.
@media screen and (prefers-color-scheme: light) {
html {
background: #fefbea;
}
body {
color: #191917;
}
a {
color: #191917;
}
.header-img {
filter: brightness(0%) saturate(100%) invert(5%) sepia(9%) saturate(548%)
hue-rotate(22deg) brightness(97%) contrast(90%);
}
}
I used an online tool to generate the SVG filter to make it match the rest of the website. My only gripe is some of the pictures I have on the website with white backgrounds don’t really match the cream colour, but that’s fine. I’ll work to add borders or something later (they didn’t really match the dark theme either so it’s fine I guess).
That being said, my website is incredibly simple. I’m sure it’ll be a little more complicated to do the same for bigger or more complicated sites/CMSs. But it’s incredibly easy and follows what the user wants, so I do recommend spending thirty minutes finding a colour scheme that works for you and throw it on your website.
Please do this when you get the chance. Inside source code forge preview is not the place to ‘host’ your blog as its filled with someone else’s distracting UI.
Flashbang metaphor is fine as far as it goes for flash and autodark mode addresses it but the proposed solution ignores the bang. Suggest adding automatic mute to websites.
Better yet just set
color-scheme: dark lightonhtmland get a dark theme for free if you only use system colorsThank you! Are there any other things I can add to tell the browser, “just do what’s best for the user, and don’t worry about breaking my other styles, because I don’t have any, because I don’t know what’s best for the user”?
This is much better. I’ve changed the post and my website to reflect this
I could say “please don’t make me turn my screen brightness all the way up” in the same vein - dark-mode only websites are borderline unreadable for some people, and in my experience, about 80% of websites that I visit that don’t respect my browser’s selected color scheme (via
prefers-color-scheme) are dark-mode only, with a simple CSS override leaving me with white-on-white text. It goes both ways 🤷I use both light and dark modes on a frequent basis.
I have a lot of floaters in my eyes, so tend to prefer dark modes as it makes for a less distracting reading environment.
On the other hand, when I present in class light mode is much more legible on the projector. (Which lowers brightness with a lot of dark) I also prefer bright mode in bright locations, such as outside.
There are values to both sides, and while the title of the post is a bit accusatory, the content is important but not enough. I encourage people on both sides to consider the value of the other, and to ensure that the experience is good for those in both camps.
Turn down your brightness?
And so we have moved from ‘no such thing as themes/modes’ to ‘a nice feature some users appreciate’ to ‘not offering this feature is SWATting your users’.
I realise we’re on the internet, but this seems a bit of an uncharitable interpretation?
The author’s offering an actual solution to a problem that some people have. I didn’t see any discussion as to the moral rectitude of dark vs light mode.
I will admit I never really considered dark mode to be an accessibility feature until receiving a request for dark mode on app that was going to be used in darkened industrial control rooms. For some people, it really is important.
It’s not that easy. If you setup a whole theme you have to change a lot more. If you have images, they will still have white background. If you use SVGs (to scale it better, hello fellow 4k users, “please don’t blurry me”), then you probably have black lines on black background now.. There are tons of other tiny things that can break, and I don’t expect people who actually just write some blogs to test this for every configuration.
You can recolour SVG with CSS, that’s one of the biggest benefits to SVG
currentColoris a thing.I haven’t found a way to do that with multi-colored SVGs in inkscape
This is absolutely true and is why personally I’m not a user of custom styles (who has the time?). But it’s a start, if you acknowledge that it’s not the intended use and may have mixed results.
Maybe ship the CSS of your choice and let your browsers reader-mode take over from there for all the custom requirements of others ? Otherwise I’ll probably just default to no CSS, so it looks like disabling CSS completely. And even that won’t work very well if you need colors for Code highlighting.
Describing sites as ‘flashbanging them’ involves a moral judgement.
Honestly? I feel like you need to personally be slapped with a large trout.
Is that “advocating physical violence”? or “a ridiculous sentence born of exaggeration that’s telling you to lighten the fuck up”? You decide!
Not particularly…in many computer games, notably the Counter-Strike series, a flashbang was implemented with a bright white flash that fades. (At LAN parties, you could always tell a successful flash by the CRT lighting up an opponent’s face and the wall behind them. Good fun.)
I figured the author was alluding to that big white flash upon switching to a new web page that did not handle that dark mode preference gracefully.
Clearly it’s a joke.
People tend not to sugarcoat unpleasant things. When I was asking support of a brokerage service/website about their plans on adding dark mode, I described their then-super-bright website just as it felt: that it resembles an interrogation when I’m using it in the evening.
Got a chuckle from the support person. They suggested using browser addon but added dark mode some time later anyway.
Wow, website’s really gone downhill hasn’t it
Why is this unhelpful, unproductive, inflammatory troll comment the most highly upvoted comment?
Because the title of the post is just as inflammatory (in wording as well) and everyone vibes with this response. If someone doesn’t like how a website looks then I’d suggest using an extension to force it instead of asking politely through a setting that may or may not be supported. dark reader seems decent.
Nothing about the original post talks about SWAT teams.
And the post is a solution to a real issue, the comment is just … literally nothing but inflammatory. There is no value there.
Flashbangs are typically used by SWAT teams when entering premises occupied by possibly hostile individuals. This isn’t that much of a reach tbh. I don’t see why it bothers you so much considering the OP was just as tongue in cheek. It’s web stuff, barely technical, the post has already been flagged a bunch, and the responses reflect the effort.
No reason to expend a ton of energy here, gonna go play with stable diffusion.
because upvote-based discussion boards create positive feedback loops for reactionary paranoia and every forum of that structure devolves over time to produce the same type of discussion structure and lenses on how to interpret content. reddit, HN, lobsters, digg before it … this evolution happens over and over and then someone goes “i know, i’ll fix this by making a new community with better moderation” instead of questioning the fundamental voting structure that underpins every one of these doomed communities.
Don’t forget Slashdot!
What’s a better voting structure?
I’m not at all convinced voting is the right model, because the people that don’t know about a topic vastly outnumber the people that do know about a topic. Maayyyyybe a pagerank-adjusted system but that has a huge bootstrapping problem, I’m not sure how you’d get that off the ground. Voting isn’t really the goal anyway, the goal is good discussion.
Opening a white webpage while using darkmode feels just like getting hit with a flashbang in a first-person shooter. That’s how I understood the title, and as a darkmode user and Counterstrike player myself, I fully relate to that description. The analogy doesn’t sound inflammatory at all. In fact, it’s quite accurate.
I can only speak for myself, but I upvoted the parent comment because I feel that the submission doesn’t bring anything to the table other than its baity title. It looks like the work of less than a minute. Measured, descriptive, non-sensationalized post titles are an important aspect of Lobste.rs for me.
The comment in question has most of the same problems as the story itself, so I don’t exactly love it, but shrug.
BRB making all my sites even lighter.
You can take advantage of HDR in Safari: https://kidi.ng/wanna-see-a-whiter-white/
oh god, please no
I’m actually lol-ing. Did you imagine spite being just as powerful as good intentions? I didn’t.
Truly spiteful would be only going full HDR flashbang if you detect
prefers-color-scheme: dark, otherwise showing a normal white.There are people with vision impairment problems, that cannot tolerate light themes, so it is a real accessibility issue.
And so we have moved on from understanding what people are joking about to completely misinterpreting them to farm karma
it’s a metaphor
[Comment removed by author]
Can’t you just put that in an override stylesheet in your browser and get the effect without anyone having to change their site?
Unfortunately that’s only in theory. In practice there will be non-negligible amount of websites that assume black-on-white defaults and break (e.g. black on black text) if they aren’t.
True that. Maybe if you had a button to turn off that style override when necessary; a bookmarklet might be able to do it, I think?
I think the link is broken? This one worked for me: https://github.com/npmaile/blog/blob/main/posts/1.%20flashbang.md
Thank you. I changed the file name shortly after posting and forgot that that would break the link
I guess I’ll clean it up later
I use Dark Reader as most of a solution to this problem, but every now and then there is a webpage that wants to be light so bad that even that doesn’t work.
Unfortunately, that’s the case for Wikipedia, at least for articles that contain math.
If we’re going to say we care about a11y, can we adjust our link color so it’s not just the default blue against black in dark mode?
It was actually pretty easy to implement what the author was recommending on my website.
I used an online tool to generate the SVG filter to make it match the rest of the website. My only gripe is some of the pictures I have on the website with white backgrounds don’t really match the cream colour, but that’s fine. I’ll work to add borders or something later (they didn’t really match the dark theme either so it’s fine I guess).
That being said, my website is incredibly simple. I’m sure it’ll be a little more complicated to do the same for bigger or more complicated sites/CMSs. But it’s incredibly easy and follows what the user wants, so I do recommend spending thirty minutes finding a colour scheme that works for you and throw it on your website.
Thanks for trying it out!
Please do this when you get the chance. Inside source code forge preview is not the place to ‘host’ your blog as its filled with someone else’s distracting UI.
Flashbang metaphor is fine as far as it goes for flash and autodark mode addresses it but the proposed solution ignores the bang. Suggest adding automatic mute to websites.