Please HN, please. This is one, if not, the first site that I visit after making my coffee. The glaring white background is absolutely horrendous. Please add a dark mode feature.
The crazy thing is that people are suggesting things that should simply be added on as a function of the site. It's 2019, Dark mode is here to stay, why not just add it natively instead of having to install yet another plug-in/add-in/extension?
That is an unusual idea, although a lot of that stuff is good idea. Some of my ideas I wrote in a document how to make a better web browser program, some are similar to this, and some aren't, and some of the stuff in this document I can add.
Some things may be a problem when using multiple text colours in a single document (or to do reverse video when the document does not specify its own colours). But I had already thought of a way to work with that, which is to support indexed colours. (You could specify both an indexed and direct colour for the same property, so that the direct colour is normally used, but the indexed colour helps when needed.)
Of course, I would do it now with the existing CSS rather than the format there, although many things would be using "privileged" CSS codes, not available to document writers but are available to the user. There would also be additional unprivileged codes available, usable by both the user and the document author.
I also thought that many things can be done with "data-" attributes and CSS styles for availability by user stylesheets even if the document author does not use them. (I have used them in HTML documents that actually have no CSS at all, for this reason.)
Because I disagree; user preferences should be a function of the client software rather than a function of the site. (This is especially true when the web page does not have its own CSS, or if it is a plain text file; then the user preferences on the client are used to decide the fonts, colours, etc. The web site shouldn't care about this.)
> The glaring white background is absolutely horrendous.
What is it that brings people to dark background teams? I'm genuinely interested. They were a necessity back when the quality of screens was worse, but today? Is it a fashion with many followers or is there some rationale behind it?
> > The glaring white background is absolutely horrendous.
For me it's not that glaring.
> What is it that brings people to dark background themes?
On darker ambience dark colour schemes go easier on the eyes. I was a light-mode person until the office grew darker (because of some remodelations) and now I need dark mode to not feel the light attacking my eyes.
Also dark mode probably looks "cooler", less of an office job and more "hacking" vibes.
Better for the eyes and (probably) better for extending the life of the monitor also. Energy saver. Less heat and, when you scale it to millions of computers, more ecological.
Bad for selling computers. Everybody wants a million of colors dancing the macarena in their computers and is nice, for like five minutes. Ten hours and your pupils are on fire.
It's so frustrating to see all the negative responses here. Users have been asking for dark modes for 8 or 10 years now, why (especially for a site as simple as hackernews) is it dismissed? As a user, I don't want to have to install plugins or change browser/os settings, especially on mobile. I want a button on the website that changes the colors. Why is that so much to ask?
I've made a simple port for Robb Owen's VSCode synthwave theme for Stylus for Hackernews.
It's really not complete yet, and may break at any time, but it works ok enough for me right now. If you want to try it out. Hopping it helps :)
https://github.com/oxodao/synthwave-themed-sites/blob/master...
