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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Sad that the state of affairs is that "offering a light and dark mode" is seen as a best practice for user choice in web styling. Oh, thank you, web developer, for letting me choose between two color schemes! Meanwhile, I can choose my desktop window colors, text colors, fonts, text size, down to the individual element, and have been able to do this since at least the 90s. If I want yellow comic sans on purple window backgrounds, I can have it. But not on a web page! How far we have regressed when it comes to user preferences and honoring them.

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Weird, I’m offended by the opposite end of this. Why am I “theming” websites? What, is this MySpace? I want the professional paid/trained developer to design the site. If it’s light, I expect there to be good reasons for it. If not, ditto.

I feel the same way about salads in restaurants—I don’t want to have to slice produce, add dressing, and toss my own salad at the table without a bowl or proper utensils. I want the professionals who I am paying to prepare my meal to handle that. If I have problems with any of the ingredients, or some desire for unreasonable quantities of dressing, then I can make requests. Serving me a plate of neatly partitioned ingredients strikes me as an insane thing to do…I suppose unless it comes with fondue or I have signed up for some hibachi nonsense to make my dinner more “interactive”.

I have fully lost the thread, apologies, carry on.

OP's way of thinking is correct and better than all of the self-centered and callous replies I've seen here - y'all are the REASON we have to do things like, e.g. onerous ADA compliance measures and similar fights for user rights.

The ideal web would give the option of better separating form and function when possible. I'm well aware that this is an old set of values from another time, but today they're more important than ever, not just aesthetically, but with reference to ability and power and dare I say, freedom.

You seem to take offense at the idea that you have to read something that someone else designed. How do you cope with books, magazines, presentations, signs, menus in restaurants, etc?

Calling this a “sad state of affairs” is pretty dramatic. You have to gaze upon things that aren’t in your preferred colors, oh my!

It's a sad state of affairs because it's a regression.

This was trivial for websites 15 years ago, but due to increasing complexity, it's no longer feasible. We've put more and more styling type things in JS, which really undermines web as a platform.

This is why CSS exists. This isn't some weirdo use case, this is THE use case. We're all losing the plot.

I mean, yes, that is a feature of css, but the idea that web pages are somehow obligated to use that feature or be ridiculed is silly. It’s all about how much the presenter wants to cater to the preferences of their audience. And sometimes, the answer is “not at all. the information is presented in a reasonable way and effort spent on formatting options is wasted.” This is why books are not usually offered in large print versions unless there is a compelling reason like a large portion of the target audience needing it.

I don't think they're obligated, I just don't think the software is very good.

Which is fine. Most software is shit, so they should feel right at home. I'm just not going to pretend that the current state of web applications is at all acceptable.

It's awful in so many ways. Awful, awful, awful.

So very dramatic. Are books awful if they only offer one color scheme?

This is way too old school for me (and I've been developing with JS/CSS since 1997 and HTML since ... before that. On my site I just use prefers-color-scheme and have a toggle to switch light/dark it if the user wants, persisting the choice locally. I detect Dark Reader and honor the user's choice with that.

What would you do if you had the option to choose any font of your choosing? What color for the headers? The background of the buttons? Should you be able to define the border radius? The CSS transitions? All of CSS?

You can do that. There are extension for that.

I don't think this is a concern for the vast majority of users.

The aspects you mentioned are part of a theme. The light and dark settings control the visual scheme, which is entirely different.

It is ludicrous to expect every web page to give the user control over individual theme elements. If you want such level of control, you can override them yourself with a custom style sheet.

Well it's his/her own website that you're viewing. Be thankful that they care about your and others' preferred scheme because some don't.

You change the css stylesheet of the website, there is extensions for that.

It's possible you just didn't look hard enough for how.

Sure, it's buried in settings on all browsers. My point is it's not a path that most web developers care about, and a lot of web sites are not robust to turning off styling and/or substituting your own.

Use an extension (Stylus?) to inject css.

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