Comment by setzer22
5 years ago
While I partially agree with you (that's why I upvoted) in that it's a waste of everyone's time having every website developer worry about dark mode I still think scrollbars and zoom are fundamentally different from a dark mode in that the latter cannot be detached from aesthetics.
The color pallete of a page is important, and maintaining a consistent look and feel across normal and dark mode can only be done reliably by each website's designer.
So I guess we need both the ability to have the browser auto-calculate a default dark mode, and a way for aestetically-conscious web designers to override it, and that's what we're moving towards.
but dark mode is an accessibility feature and used to be called high-contrast mode. This is a solved problem and has been for at least 30 years.
In fact it's already in chrome on android, no work needs to be done (other than enabling it). Here's an image gallery guide I made: https://imgur.com/a/njNTO6T
This is the right approach, it should be solved at the browser level. In fact, it already is.
The only responsibility of web developers should be to not go out of their way and do silly things that break this.
IMO it's two separate things. Both useful on their own right.
High contrast is very useful for people with visual difficulties, but might even be counter-productive for certain types of eye strain.
I'm under the impression people asking for dark mode are looking for something that will emit less light off their screens, not necessarily make it look nore contrast-y, and the two are more often than not opposite.