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Dark mode’s bright future: How dark mode will transform Wikipedia’s accessibility
(diff.wikimedia.org)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
So, if I'm reading this right it's basically just a 17 paragraph essay that boils down to, "Sorry we suck at CSS and it took us a decade to finally get around to rooting out all the random shit from 2014 that was hard-coded to display as rgb(0,0,0) or whatever, which was a capability that in retrospect we really shouldn't have handed out like candy?"
The TV Tropes wiki has managed to have a built in dark mode for at least the last 7 years. TV Tropes. Come on, guys.
I'm baffled by the section about "making a shortcut that darkens all the colors on the page." I'm positive that's the intent of that entire blurb, to dazzle people with bullshit in the hopes that they won't ask Hard Questions, because no competent designer would ever try such a thing. It is a self-evidently moronic idea. You don't fuck with elements you didn't create and don't control, like images and color swatches.
There are only really two viable possibilities, here:
Isn't #2 the only option?
Websites specifying color for foreground (or background) and assuming browsers will use whatever color they're expecting for the other has always existed, and still exists
If you're getting fancy and specifying colors, you can't cheap out and not specify all colors
If the browser ignores all your colors at that point, then it's displaying as the user intended
If you only specified some of the colors, it's a bug of the website
There are actually things websites can do which may be more common than you'd think. At a high level you could convert all the custom colours to HSV format and slightly lower the value and saturation according to some function. This is fairly common for images.