But I don't think it's safe to assume that someone who sets a dark UI also wants web pages displayed like that.
I set dark mode in macOS to have the UI fade into the background and reveal the content; I don't want or expect that websites will present white text on a dark background too. That's fine for coding but can be less readable for long form articles depending on the ambient lighting.
To me black on white is just a hangover from old skeuomorphic design principles.
it's quite odd. It could be just a personal thing though.
The bigger factor seems to be environment you are currently in:
- Fluorescent operating room/accountant's office/Initech --> white backgrounds needed.
- Darkened lab/color-correct studio/night-time --> dark backgrounds.
And of course this has gotten worse over the years as control over the gui theme has been lost.
Just ask any Linux user that uses dark themes and you will find out what happens when the system theme messes with the site theme.
I myself always set a light theme in my Firefox config so I don't get a black on black text/background issue.
With how customized the styling on sites is every site needs to implement their own dark version otherwise you will run into situations where the styling is broken.
It is done completely different fashion than it was done on gnu/linux, on linux it was probably done by changing user agent style sheet (changes default bg color on body etc), when here it is done with media query (which webdev must explicit implement on his part so he can make sure that everything works).
E.g. in a crud app with top/side nav, and then a form in the main section, the nav bars can be rendered as pale/dark to suit the user selection, while the main content area retains the focus.
Just personally don't want to read 2,000+ word articles of white text on a dark background just because I like the browser UI to be dark. Others might, though — hopefully browsers will offer a setting for dark mode independent of the OS-level setting.
Dark Mode should only be for UI elements not for actual content. They would never do that with a PDF either.
Hell even you-tube does that now.
I still would prefer to change a setting once, rather than establish a profile on every website to enable a dark theme.
I like to read pdfs in emacs alongside my notes, and I am very pleased that emacs' pdf-tools allows me to map colors as I choose (kind of - there are only two colors, foreground and background).
Sites that support dark mode should (and will almost always) have a toggle for it. It'd be better if this setting helped _inform_ the default initial state rather than _forcing_ a choice on you. To me, that's a lot easier done with a Javascript API than CSS.
With the css solution it’s doable on a site that has no javascript.
JS should not be involved, and we don't need every site to have its own version of the switch, located in a different place and looking different.
If it's done well, absolutely it's safe to assume.
I am extremely excited to research and start using this feature. I don't want to force anyone to use dark UIs that don't want them, but simultaneously I can't bring myself to make more light-themed apps and pages when I want exclusively dark themes for everything that runs on my machine.
I don't think it's safe to assume they don't. I can't stand web pages in general that are white background/black text.
I've coded in black background / white (or coloured) text for about two decades now, and I'm so glad Apple is making the dark theme a standard at this point. There's literally thousands of articles about the eye strain that's caused from the poor decision to present information this way. We don't need literally at this point millions of photons screaming light at our faces at more than 300 nits every moment.
I think Android has this option too?
Basically, it’s not just a “macOS thing”, lots of systems now have dark modes.
Why is that? According to [1] Safari has 14% market share. Just the desktop version has 5%.
But that is assuming the content is aimed at this group.