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I'd like to see a similar write-up for dark mode. It took 20 years and it still says "beta" even though its basically switching a CSS template. Its a pattern I've seen over many different websites, so there must be a common reason.

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Mostly, there's a large amount of CSS that has been written over the years that assumed it was on a light-colored website. In mediawiki itself, in mediawiki extensions, in gadgets and userscripts, and in site-specific overrides across all the Wikiprojects. Most annoyingly to deal with, sometimes hardcoded into pages -- table formatting on wikipedia is often using inline styles to get specific background colors, for instance.

You can see a few hundred tickets about dark-mode related issues if you're curious what's been done and why it's still in beta: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/8zofdVSnra...

(I work for Wikimedia. I didn't work on dark mode, beyond a few minor adjustments to components I do work on to be compatible with it.)

Wow, that link is a great resource. Thanks for the info

The answer is somewhere between - nobody really cared enough to try until the last few years, combined with allowing users to write their own css means there is a very long tail of content that is assuming light mode which needs to be fixed.

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