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Comment by pyrolistical | Hacker News Reader

Seems like something that could be calculated and baked server side

For accessibility, it’s better to do this client side, so clients can adjust it themselves to be more contrasting or whatever.

But you still need to pick contrasting colors manually ? This one isn't making new ones for you.

CSS function doing "here is color A, here is color B, make one that is same hue as color B but contrasting" would be much more useful

Clients are free to provide a contrast dial independently of that. For example there’s a Font Contrast extension for Firefox.

that's cool. use both. calculate a good default contrast server side, use proposal to allow client side to override default

Unless it's a dynamic arbitrary colour (user-selected, overlaid on an image, etc.) then there's not much reason to be doing colour contrast calculations.

Your site's design should just have well-chosen colours.

So GP was relevant because that’s exactly what GitHub is doing: dynamically picking arbitrary colors and trying to put appropriately contrasting text on them.

The only reason this is a problem is because different monitors have different display characteristics compounded by arbitrary viewing environments. A client-side function can measure neither the response of the monitor nor the ambient light of the room, so this problem can never be solved in this manner.

Both of those are already APIs today in phones.

And there's decent reason to not want to tell the server either.

If it's a static colour, sure. But if it's set by the user with a colour picker, that doesn't really work.

except the server doesn't know if the client prefers light or dark mode

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