[HN Gopher] Building dark mode on Stack Overflow
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Building dark mode on Stack Overflow
Author : lobo_tuerto
Score : 35 points
Date : 2020-04-04 06:42 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stackoverflow.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (stackoverflow.blog)
| butz wrote:
| Great, now every visit from private mode shows huge "dark mode"
| banner. How about just using prefers-color-scheme media query?
| BubRoss wrote:
| I'm not sure choosing a color scheme for your CSS is really
| 'building' anything.
| userbinator wrote:
| I remember using a forum software on a site long ago (around
| the late 90s/early 2000s timeframe) where one of the options in
| the user preferences page let you adjust the colours of various
| things --- and not as in "pick from these limited choices", but
| as in "enter the CSS colour value, either a name or #hex", and
| I believe it saved them for every user since you'd only see
| them when logged in. Does anyone else remember what that could
| be?
| arkitaip wrote:
| It could be a major undertaking for a sufficiently complex site
| like Stackoverflow, just like the article illustrates, because
| there just so many UI elements to re-color.
| BubRoss wrote:
| Thinking that choosing colors is a major undertaking is one
| of the most preposterous things I've read in here in a long
| time. Everything in this article should take a morning at
| most. People need to stop pretending trivial things are
| difficult just because they want to write a blog post.
| shakermakr wrote:
| When you have your OS set to dark mode and a site blinds you with
| it's whiteness...you see the total UX fail. UX is about the U. If
| they've specified I want things black on contrast, then support
| it. Because they expect it. Post shows how feasible it is...and
| users, the U, will respect you for it and keep coming back.
|
| Otherwise your first impression is simply _blinding_ and not in a
| positive way
| arkitaip wrote:
| This literally happened as I switched from TFA to this HN
| post...
| megavolcano wrote:
| Dark Reader extension does a better job than their design, what a
| waste of time, effort and cash.
| musicale wrote:
| Rearranging the deck chairs won't save stackoverflow.com.
| why-oh-why wrote:
| If you think StackOverflow needs to be "saved" you're deathly
| mistaken.
|
| Just because some complain about it it doesn't mean that it's
| failing.
| FpUser wrote:
| I can not digest dark mode when working with the text. I know it
| is individual as I saw that many programmers do use it. To each
| their own I guess.
| ucarion wrote:
| The article mentions they use Bezier curves over the HSB
| colorspace.
|
| > I used Lyft's amazing Colorbox to help normalize our colors.
| Instead of a naive linear scale at 10% increments, I used bezier
| curves--a vast improvement at the more extreme ends of the scale.
|
| Linear HSB is _very naive_ , but HSB is still _quite_ naive. It
| 's just a cylindrical version of a color space optimized for
| displays, not human perception.
|
| I don't understand why they wouldn't instead opt for the CIELAB
| color space, or its cylindrical equivalent. IBM does this, and it
| gives them effortless support for dark mode, by just flipping the
| luminance component of colors:
|
| https://www.ibm.com/design/language/color
|
| You can visualize the CIELAB behind IBM's color scheme here:
|
| https://cielab.io/ (go to "IBM Carbon")
| ssivark wrote:
| I think site/application-specific _toggling_ of dark mode is a
| fundamentally broken idea, since the default on the web is white
| background pages. It's an awful experience to turn up the
| brightness when viewing dark pages, when most pages you open will
| be white by default! Ideally, all portals must support theming
| modes, but I'd like the switching to be seamless, to prevent such
| nasty surprises. Maybe based on a standard (something like the
| site delivers both CSS sets, and logic in the browser chooses
| which ones to display, or suitably "invert" the default)
| saagarjha wrote:
| You're thinking of prefers-color-scheme, which already exists
| and is adopted by Stack Overflow.
| ssivark wrote:
| My question is this: Why would I use dark mode on SO, or
| specific sites, if the next site I open will be rendered with
| the light theme with high probability?
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| This is a good article. I'll bookmark it and probably refer to it
| in future.
|
| That said, why does everybody care about Dark Mode so much these
| days? It's an interesting problem; I worked on it 20 years ago
| and solved it adequately for my own purposes. But it's not a very
| _important_ problem, especially right now.
| sqs wrote:
| Dark mode is much more readable for many people. That's why it
| matters. In my opinion as a user, it's as much of an
| improvement as going from a UI with tiny fonts to one with
| legible text sizes. And once most sites and apps you use have a
| dark theme, the ones that don't become even more jarring and
| noticeable.
| beders wrote:
| It is comical we are getting excited about a bunch of CSS files
| and other assets.
|
| As others have pointed out: Desktop apps never had this problem
| and decent operating systems gave you much more freedom to adjust
| the color style to your liking.
|
| Now we have half-assed solutions running in a hypertext display
| engine. Amazing! ;)
| noahtallen wrote:
| IIRC, Windows and macOS only offered built in dark mode in the
| system UI components until the last year or two, and definitely
| don't offer much color customization freedom... except for the
| global highlight or accent color
| [deleted]
| userbinator wrote:
| It used to be far more customisable for Windows; this is
| Windows 2.03:
|
| https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/wi.
| ..
|
| 3.11:
|
| https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/wi.
| ..
|
| 95:
|
| https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/wi.
| ..
|
| ...and that dialog remained almost unchanged up until Windows
| 7:
|
| https://www.dedoimedo.com/images/computers_new_2/windows-7-s.
| ..
|
| Unfortunately, after Win7 it was removed, and they basically
| took away customisation completely in Win10.
| noisem4ker wrote:
| What's left of customization is the choice of an "accent
| color", plus light and dark modes.
| ken wrote:
| Mac OS had themes (briefly) back in 1998 [1]. Linux (GTK+ and
| Qt) still do. Windows has supported custom fonts/colors since
| at least 1992, even if the result wasn't always tasteful [2].
|
| [1]:
| https://www.blakespot.com/mac/Images/Gallerypix/drawing2.jpg
| [2]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/a-tribute-to-the-
| windows-31-ho...
| grecy wrote:
| > _It is comical we are getting excited about a bunch of CSS
| files and other assets_
|
| Especially on a site like stack overflow when there are
| literally 10,000 other things they need to improve that would
| be appreciated more.
| JadeNB wrote:
| That's the SO way, though--there's so much they need to fix
| and won't or can't, that they need to distract from their
| user-hostility by making a fuss over whatever small user-
| positive things they _do_ do.
| nikivi wrote:
| Hope GitHub is next to release dark mode
| userbinator wrote:
| As someone who really _really_ hates the "reduce contrast"
| trend, I personally thought the screenshot labeled "have to do
| better than this" was the most readable. The one after that just
| looks faded.
|
| Then again, I also find it funny that "dark mode" is heralded as
| something revolutionary, when long ago people could customise UIs
| far more. You can still do that with userstyles, another thing
| that seems to have gotten mostly ignored these days...
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| 100 years from now, 2020 will be remembered for three things:
| Covid-19, the general public spending all their time talking
| about Tiger King, and every programmer spending all their time
| talking about Dark Mode.
|
| Perhaps these things are not unconnected.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I agree, I prefer the high contrast too. I also agree about
| customization, I would suggest using proper CSS classes and
| HTML and so on in order to allow better user customization with
| user styles and stuff like that, rather than relying on the
| service provider. Web pages without CSS can use the settings
| (for colours, font sizes, etc) specified by the user, so
| someone should not complain about the lack of CSS, and more so
| too you should not use CSS too much on web pages I think. (But
| if you do, ensure you do not do it wrong; if you set the
| foreground colour you must also set the background colour and
| vice versa. But don't specify colours at all unless you need to
| use multiple colours in your document.)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I personally thought the screenshot labeled "have to do
| better than this" was the most readable. The one after that
| just looks faded.
|
| Hm. I like the "better" one more. However, it's cheating -- the
| first screenshot displays a lot of white text in the filters
| and the text of the questions. The text of the questions is
| most of what I find off-putting about the first screenshot.
|
| The second screenshot displays no white text at all. The
| filters menu isn't visible. The text of the questions isn't
| visible. Text that's gray in the second screenshot is also gray
| in the first screenshot.
|
| What kind of comparison is this?
| sdegutis wrote:
| I very much miss the system theming of Windows XP era. Sure it
| often looked like crap but sometimes it was great too. Maybe
| it's just nostalgia though. But I guess we still have that with
| desktop Linux...... for the trade offs.
| endorphone wrote:
| I don't think anyone heralded it as revolutionary. It's an
| affordance to the reality that it's a different experience
| using devices in darkness than in brightness. Mobile screens
| make dark situations more prevalent.
|
| As to UI customization, often that was an inconvenient cop out
| not a great enabler. "We don't want to figure this out so just
| change things yourself, but then you'll switch PCs or reinstall
| and you'll lose all of those customizations and you'll never do
| it again and you will forever leave everything vanilla".
|
| Is it worth websites making a big deal about? No, not really...
| At most it should put a little badge when it detects the dark
| mode CSS allowing unwilling users to disable it, but it doesn't
| seem like something that gets dragged on as long as it has by a
| couple of sites.
| blt wrote:
| I agree - it has a nice high contrast and I didn't really see
| any significant flaws.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I find it funny that it's pitched as helping eye strain and
| readability when a light background dilates your eyes,
| improving focus.
|
| Oh, that on everyone patting themselves on the back for
| building dark mode.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Maybe. I find so much white light overwhelming and have used
| dark styles nearly everywhere for many years. Even with night
| color shifting the lighter backgrounds feel like overkill
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(page generated 2020-04-04 23:00 UTC)