Comment by ochoseis

5 years ago

For the sake of simplicity, could we just serve up a subdomain darknews.ycombinator.com, same content, just different stylesheet?

10 comments

ochoseis

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pjscott  5 years ago

When you click on a link to the news.ycombinator.com domain, what should happen if you prefer dark mode? And vice versa?

In comparison, the pure-CSS ideas that some people are posting would work automatically if your browser supports dark mode, and would enlarge the (cached with long ttl) CSS file only very slightly.

  • DenseComet  5 years ago

    Unfortunately, there are some of us who also like the solarized type light mode in HN more than dark mode, but we use dark mode at the system level because the OS light mode is awful.

    Pure CSS would be quite cool, but we'd probably also need a snippet of JS to add a button allowing to switch between light and dark mode. (There's probably a way to do it without JS that someone will hopefully comment too.)

    • noisem4ker  5 years ago

      They could put a preference in the profile page. But I think that switching the theme would be the browser's job.

    • dharmab  5 years ago

      By using CSS variables, only a few lines of JS are needed- small enough that they can be inlined in the HTML.

IAmGraydon  5 years ago

I don’t think you’ve properly considered what a terrible idea this is.

  • djjsjdjsjsjs  5 years ago

    Please explain as I am curious

    • dharmab  5 years ago

      Adding dark mode CSS adds a few hundred bytes, maybe a couple kb at most to the site.

      A separate subdomain:

      - Requires separate TLS certificates to be maintained.

      - Doesn't play nice with caching.

      - Doesn't play nice with password managers.

      - Doesn't work with any existing links. Users would have to manually add the `dark` prefix.

      - Is generally a bad user experience.

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