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Dear web developers: set the font color, too

luu.io

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Re: Dear web developers: set the font color, too

#111

Post by anonytrary »

Pretty tangential, but with AMOLED screens, I really hope society starts embracing a dark-mode default for interfaces. There is no reason to use light-mode with modern screens. It's taxing on the eyes, probably not good for kids and teens who are using screens 4 hours a day and it doesn't seem to offer benefits over dark-mode in terms of accessibility.

It's nice to see more and more websites and operating systems providing dark theme toggles, but I hope one day that light-mode becomes a thing of the past.

Re: Dear web developers: set the font color, too

#112

Post by goatlover »

anonytrary wrote: post #111

Pretty tangential, but with AMOLED screens, I really hope society starts embracing a dark-mode default for interfaces. There is no reason to use light-mode with modern screens. It's taxing on the eyes, probably not good for kids and teens who are using screens 4 hours a day and it doesn't seem to offer benefits over dark-mode in terms of accessibility. It's nice to see more and more websites and operating systems pro…

I prefer reading black text on white screens, thank you very much. Code in an editor is different because syntax highlighting is better on black.

Re: Dear web developers: set the font color, too

#113

Post by saagarjha »

anonytrary wrote: post #111

Pretty tangential, but with AMOLED screens, I really hope society starts embracing a dark-mode default for interfaces. There is no reason to use light-mode with modern screens. It's taxing on the eyes, probably not good for kids and teens who are using screens 4 hours a day and it doesn't seem to offer benefits over dark-mode in terms of accessibility. It's nice to see more and more websites and operating systems pro…

> There is no reason to use light-mode with modern screens. It's taxing on the eyes, probably not good for kids and teens who are using screens 4 hours a day and it doesn't seem to offer benefits over dark-mode in terms of accessibility.

Aside from the fact that many people prefer it?

Re: Dear web developers: set the font color, too

#114

Post by saagarjha »

_trampeltier wrote: post #53
alias_neo wrote: post #45

This is a real issue for me at times. I have a dark theme set in Gnome, because I want dark system windows, but lots of sites don't bother setting their colours properly, so if I open the Web UI for my Ubiquiti Router, or one of my switches, and try to select a drop-down, the background of it is dark, like my system theme, and the text is dark, so I can't see what I'm choosing. Other times, like if I'm entering text…

Would be cool, if websites would ask, if you like bright or dark website.

Perhaps @media(prefers-color-scheme)?

Re: Dear web developers: set the font color, too

#115

Post by saagarjha »

kalleboo wrote: post #34

Browsers on macOS appear to be smart enough to not pass through the system dark theme to web content. I'm seeing white forms in Safari and Firefox (Chrome doesn't seem to support dark theming at all). As much as I'm a proponent of OS-native UX, CSS styling of form controls on the web has been a crapfest ever since IE(?) introduced it way back when. Whenever CSS touches a web form control it should just go completely…

> Browsers on macOS appear to be smart enough to not pass through the system dark theme to web content.

There two main reasons here:

* Browsers don't support dark themes themselves.

* Browsers don't support @media(prefers-color-scheme).

Re: Dear web developers: set the font color, too

#116

Post by saagarjha »

chriswarbo wrote: post #74
SquareWheel wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment intrigued me, so I did some digging. Looks like "prefers-color-scheme" is currently being considered by both Chrome[1] and Firefox[2]. A can-I-use page was just created for it[3]. I'm excited by this one! Think I'll add dark mode support to my simple blog right now. [1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=889087 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1494034 [3] https://canius…

Wow, what an awful thing to standardise! Are there equivalents for high/low-contrast? Red themes, blue themes, multicolour themes, etc.? Why layer something like this on top of an override system, when devs can choose to just not override those things? As an example, the only CSS colours I use on chriswarbo.net are either semi-transparent, or mid-grey (which work on light and dark themes, although I might revisit tha…

> Are there equivalents for high/low-contrast? Red themes, blue themes, multicolour themes, etc.?

Not yet, although the API seems open enough to add this.

Re: Dear web developers: set the font color, too

#117

Post by saagarjha »

aboutruby wrote: post #54

Apple introduced Dark Mode expecting all major websites to maintain some CSS just for a small percentage of macOS users. I don't think it's going to happen (and it's not happening)

I've migrated my website, FWIW, and I've seen a couple of other websites already adopting it. This is even considering the fact that no stable browser has enabled this feature.

Re: Dear web developers: set the font color, too

#118

Post by luuio »

bilkow wrote: post #107
luuio wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked through the bug report and couldn't find the specification you're referencing. Do you have a link to it by any chance?

Just found it! https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/rendering.html#phrasi... "The initial value for the 'color' property is expected to be black. The initial value for the 'background-color' property is expected to be 'transparent'. The canvas's background is expected to be white."

If I read it correctly, what you just quoted is within the context of the element.

Re: Dear web developers: set the font color, too

#119

Post by chriswarbo »

rancyber wrote: post #104

This is the browser's fault for violating the HTML spec. As per the specification, the default font color is complete black and the default background color is complete white. To my knowledge the only browser that does not honor this is Firefox[1], and it is an eighteen year old bug which they refuse to fix. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315

> This is the browser's fault for violating the HTML spec. As per the specification, the default font color is complete black and the default background color is complete white.

Your claim surprised me so much I went and re-read the latest HTML spec ( https://www.w3.org/TR/html52/rendering.html#rendering ) and it does indeed say:

> The initial value for the color property is expected to be black. The initial value for the background-color property is expected to be transparent. The canvas' background is expected to be white.

The CSS specs ( https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/REC-css-color-3-20180619/ and https://www.w3.org/TR/2011/REC-CSS2-20110607/colors.html#q14... ) say that the initial values depend on the user agent (hence deferring to the above quote):

> Name: color

> Initial: depends on user agent

> 'background-color'

> Initial: transparent

However, is this also the case for form fields? Scanning through the various CSS specs I can't find any mention of form fields (e.g. buttons, text inputs, etc.). The HTML specs don't seem to specify anything w.r.t. styling form fields either.

Re: Dear web developers: set the font color, too

#120

Post by chriswarbo »

SquareWheel wrote: post #102
chriswarbo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sites are already styled according to the user's preference, by default. If you want to respect the user's preference, stop overriding things with CSS.

Sites are styled by default browser stylings. When font changes are inherited from user's settings however, it basically just breaks everything. For accessibility reasons, using the zoom feature is much more stable than increasing the default font size.

> Sites are styled by default browser stylings

Which users choose according to their preferences (e.g. Firefox offers a preferences dialogue for this, and a bunch of about:config options). Whilst most users leave these as the OS/browser vendor's defaults, (in the words of Rush) "if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice".

> When font changes are inherited from user's settings however, it basically just breaks everything.

> For accessibility reasons, using the zoom feature is much more stable than increasing the default font size.

So you're agreeing that all these sites are broken?

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