Aren't Hacker News users supposed to be able to hack it easily?
Hackers also use banks. Are them supposed to hack them as well?
> Hackers also use banks
Modifying CSS on my machine for my viewing isn’t comparable to hacking a bank.
Please add a "dark" theme for Hacker News
31–40 of 81 posts
Re: Please add a "dark" theme for Hacker News
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whats the briefest code change which would achieve these outcomes in a browser neutral manner? I hate to think of a massive .js burden to get there, I like sites that are both visually simple and mechanistically simple behind the text.
Replace the outdated font stack with `system-ui` in CSS, remove all `font-size` directives, remove the gray-ish background, make the light-grey text slightly darker. This fixes many accessibility issues with not a single line of JavaScript required. Mobile usability is more difficult, given that HN relies on tables for layout. I also can't find a single ARIA attribute in the HTML code. Between that and the absence of…
I'd suggest a two phase approach. 1) come into conformance with the least possible change to current experience, and 2) make the structural change which might change current user experience but provides for assisted access improvement. I'm not a fan of big-change, and I am of a belief most of the current HN mob are pretty OK that it remains much as it is (not that they are unwilling to countenance change but there's a certain curmudgeonly love of this being an un-lovely site. -And I certainly don't think we deliberately don't want to help people who have to rely on semantic element aware readers)
Re: Please add a "dark" theme for Hacker News
#33What I'd* like to do is let people upload their own CSS and have HN serve it back to them. Then you can make your own darkmode (or anymode), and people can share them so you can reuse someone else's. One question this is contingent on: does there exist a well-defined secure subset of CSS such that we don't have to worry about weird vulnerabilities? * actually I think this was originally kogir's idea
That's a cool idea, but it's not a substitute for meeting basic accessibility and readability needs. HN violates the WCAG accessibility standards for text contrast (your browser dev tools will happily point out which text is affected), it ignores platform fonts in favor of an outdated font stack that doesn't kern properly on many Linux devices, and it displays line lengths of up to 200 characters, even though research suggests that CPL should not exceed 70.
These are absolutely basic things, and fixing them should not require individual users to fiddle with CSS – even on a website called "Hacker" News.
Re: Please add a "dark" theme for Hacker News
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hackers also use banks. Are them supposed to hack them as well?
> Hackers also use banks Modifying CSS on my machine for my viewing isn’t comparable to hacking a bank.
I'm not comparing on those terms. I'm comparing about "being supposed" to do something. We may have the ability, but that doesn't mean that we will do everything we have the ability for.
Re: Please add a "dark" theme for Hacker News
#35What I'd* like to do is let people upload their own CSS and have HN serve it back to them. Then you can make your own darkmode (or anymode), and people can share them so you can reuse someone else's. One question this is contingent on: does there exist a well-defined secure subset of CSS such that we don't have to worry about weird vulnerabilities? * actually I think this was originally kogir's idea
Custom CSS risks being scope creep, IMO. A dark mode with options of a standard dark and a pure black dark would likely account for 99% of use anyways.
Custom CSS also means users can fix the designed-for-480p font sizes and paragraph widths, which the HN crew seem to have no interest in doing.
Re: Please add a "dark" theme for Hacker News
#36What I'd* like to do is let people upload their own CSS and have HN serve it back to them. Then you can make your own darkmode (or anymode), and people can share them so you can reuse someone else's. One question this is contingent on: does there exist a well-defined secure subset of CSS such that we don't have to worry about weird vulnerabilities? * actually I think this was originally kogir's idea
This is a thing on private tracker websites, at least Gazelle based ones. You can give a custom URL to load CSS from. Not sure I've used any other websites that allow you to do this, though I wish there were more that did. I think the odds of people being victimized with this are pretty low and people could just skim the CSS beforehand if they didn't write it.
Re: Please add a "dark" theme for Hacker News
#37Re: Please add a "dark" theme for Hacker News
#38Trivial to do in Brave (for MacOS or iOS).
Re: Please add a "dark" theme for Hacker News
#39It would be really appreciated for you guys to consider adding a dark theme for HackerNews. The reasons, well, could be added as comments here in the thread. Though, as you may imagine, it's mostly because of my eyes when I visit you guys without daylight.
Have people complaining of eyestrain from "light mode" considered checking their display brightness? Displays should match the brightness of their backgrounds, or in general somewhere around 100–150 cd/m² (aka 100–150 nits). Most monitors are capable of going much brighter than this, and really should not be used that way, because it tends to... cause eyestrain.
Effective luminosity isn't just a function of how much light the device can output at a given setting but also how much light is being blocked or is otherwise not emitted by the image being displayed. By making the background dark and the relatively sparse text light, you can lower overall light output while preserving more of the contrast.
And low contrast can also cause eye strain.
Re: Please add a "dark" theme for Hacker News
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Replace the outdated font stack with `system-ui` in CSS, remove all `font-size` directives, remove the gray-ish background, make the light-grey text slightly darker. This fixes many accessibility issues with not a single line of JavaScript required. Mobile usability is more difficult, given that HN relies on tables for layout. I also can't find a single ARIA attribute in the HTML code. Between that and the absence of…
I'd suggest a two phase approach. 1) come into conformance with the least possible change to current experience, and 2) make the structural change which might change current user experience but provides for assisted access improvement. I'm not a fan of big-change, and I am of a belief most of the current HN mob are pretty OK that it remains much as it is (not that they are unwilling to countenance change but there's…
This isn't the first time these issues have been brought up though. Or even the tenth time. I've seen many small open source projects make accessibility a top priority, actively seeking feedback from visually impaired users, going through multiple prototypes etc. With HN, this just continues to not happen. I could produce a 10-line CSS patch that would solve lots of issues, but at this point I have no reason to believe it would be accepted.