@jayeless Thanks, thatās a really good article. The description of reading a high contrast dark theme was interesting.
Thinking about this issue from the perspective of a reader, I canāt help but wonder whether leaving it to the web designer to pick colour schemes, fonts and so on is really the best way.
In theory, CSS allows designers to access OS colour settings for links, background colours, foregrounds and all sorts of controls, thereby leaving these decisions to the readers. Iād be really keen to use this, but browser implementation is patchy.
@jayeless @leonp @AlanGMarz Jessica wrote:
I canāt stand most layouts that put bright text on dark backgrounds, so I donāt use dark mode.
Iāve certainly noticed over recent years that most sites now use some approximation of black text on a white background. I find it (relatively) boring and samey but, more to the point, Iād just like to get away from the āprinted pageā metaphor. So, Iām generally guilty of using light coloured text on a darker background. I hope that people donāt find it hard to read but I think that font weight, line length and line height make more of a difference to readability. And thereās always Reader View.
@artkavanagh the red and honeydew combination looks really nice, although the contrast is maybe a bit low (I make it 3.73:1). The large text helps with that, though.
@leonp Thanks for the comment. Iāll think about the contrast. Iāve considered darkening the background a little bit but itās so easy to mess things up that Iām cautious about changing things.
@leonp Thank you. I had no idea CSS had that feature, and it looks interesting, although still not quite as detailed as letting people set their own preferred UI colours in a setting. The spottiness of browser implementations also poses an issue, as you say.
@Alangmarz When I visit your blog it's set to light mode by default, so I hadn't even noticed! š It's great to give options to people though, I think, and "light grey on dark grey" shouldn't be too high-contrast for a dark mode.
@artkavanagh I had been going to talk a little more about the "sameyness" of much of the modern web, but it wasn't really about dark mode so I took it out... I do agree though, it's refreshing to see some people doing more unique things than the one-column black-on-white (even if I don't have an issue with that kind of layout per se... it's just that it's everywhere now).