Please, for God's sake, don't screw it up. I can keep up with news on this site from a 15 kb/s shared satellite link when I'm out at sea. Except perhaps for the really big threads. I love the simple interface. It's text, it's simple, it's readable, and when I hit the spacebar, it scrolls down a page. No fancy fonts, no javascript, no nothing. I love HN for its simplicity and speed. Thanks for maintaining a good engineering philosophy.
Can we have a review before we merge the change? Make sure all issues are ironed out.
HN design is simply the best thing out there. "Moving slowly and preserving things" - I would get this engraved on my grave. This philosophy has died unfortunately and with it went robustness, simplicity, elegance, poise, beauty, accessibility, elegance, maintainability and practicality.
Thanks dang for your gandalf-like wisdom and your resilience. I like Alligators over goddamn mosquitos that have taken over the internet.
How can anyone even dare to think about indents? C'mon, I thought this was settled. Did you know that human fingers can detect roughness value down to N7? That's 1.6 micrometers. There is a bigger fish to fry than just think about indentations or bumps. Texture. Texture is everything and there is nothing else to talk about, although I am open for other ideas. Thoughts?
There are many ways for end users to force dark mode without any change on HN. "invert page colors" chrome extension, for example, does a nice job. Not ideal, but good enough.
I second the other commenter, don't do anything. Or get someone really good to help you!
There's a very solid Stylus theme for HN that I've been using as long as I can remember. Until just now I had honestly forgotten that this wasn't what HN looked like by default.
Midnight lizard (chrome) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/midnight-lizard/pb... is a good extension that can create a dark theme by changing the contrast & things like that. It does it in a way that the same theme will work on a lot of sites. They do have more dark (& light) themes on their site & you can create your own by entering a few colors & it will create a theme based on that. Stylus is good (NOT stylish), but Midnight lizard creates themes in a way that are compatible with a lot more sites that Stylus.
Is there a non userstyles.org link for this? I've blocked cookies on userstyles.org (For obvious reasons) & when you black cookies on that site it gives you a blank page. If you enable cookies it comes back.
hmm. I just tried turning off JS and reloaded Firefox. Everything seems to still work fine on HN with the theme on. I don't know much about web dev so I'm not sure what could be causing it.
I tried various of dark mode plugins in Firefox and none of them seem to be able to do their job without obvious shortcomings. For example most of them don't check the original color of the website and just invert colors of dark pages as well. Or in some cases it doesn't invert all text colors, making hyperlinks hard to read.
None of the extensions I've tested can match the dead simple CSS override I used in qutebrowser.
I just started using Dark Reader yesterday, and for the most part, it's excellent.
old.reddit.com comments are mostly unreadable, and it cripples gmail, but I've learned to take advantage of Options-Shift-D to flip it on and off when needed.
An alternative is to "opt-in" sort of how you can change the top bar color with enough Karma. Maybe that CSS is not loaded for people who dont have that same Karma? I assume people asking for the feature post often enough.
Edit:
To clarify what I mean is maybe toggling which style sheet HN gives you in settings would be ideal for all. Web standards are nice but they dont help in the minimalist ideals of HN too much.
Also, not only should "dark mode" be the responsibility of the browser, it already is. There's plenty of plugins that do this and people that want it should use them.
Dark mode is an accessibility and ergonomics feature that should be supported by websites through CSS whenever possible. Of course browsers need to support it in the first place for it to work, but that seems to be mostly the case:
chromium for android is open source ... that's where the solution should be and if you're really passionate about it, go do it. It shouldn't be the responsibility of every individual website to independently implement the feature.
Could you imagine if we entrusted every website to independently implement scroll bars and zoom? What a mess that'd be.
While I partially agree with you (that's why I upvoted) in that it's a waste of everyone's time having every website developer worry about dark mode I still think scrollbars and zoom are fundamentally different from a dark mode in that the latter cannot be detached from aesthetics.
The color pallete of a page is important, and maintaining a consistent look and feel across normal and dark mode can only be done reliably by each website's designer.
So I guess we need both the ability to have the browser auto-calculate a default dark mode, and a way for aestetically-conscious web designers to override it, and that's what we're moving towards.
but dark mode is an accessibility feature and used to be called high-contrast mode. This is a solved problem and has been for at least 30 years.
In fact it's already in chrome on android, no work needs to be done (other than enabling it). Here's an image gallery guide I made: https://imgur.com/a/njNTO6T
This is the right approach, it should be solved at the browser level. In fact, it already is.
The only responsibility of web developers should be to not go out of their way and do silly things that break this.
IMO it's two separate things. Both useful on their own right.
High contrast is very useful for people with visual difficulties, but might even be counter-productive for certain types of eye strain.
I'm under the impression people asking for dark mode are looking for something that will emit less light off their screens, not necessarily make it look nore contrast-y, and the two are more often than not opposite.
Well, if we want HN to follow best modern web practices, I recommend rewriting the whole thing with React/Node.js using TypeScript. Then, we can get a proper CSS framework in place like Material that will really allow us to get everything looking really good. I can design a cool looking loading screen that says "HN" while the JS is loading in the background.
Hah, HN's load speed actually makes it my go-to bookmark to test if everything is working okay. Internet connectivity lagging? Check HN. My own web app loading slowly? Check HN.
I’m on land in a well populated city relatively near the Bay Area and I get about half a bar on my phone. So yes! Please don’t screw this up! Because not only I like reading HN but also because it’s the only thing I can do on my phone now and it’s really helping me kick all the bad habits of being on my phone!
True, but doesn't this even save bandwidth because it doesn't need to reload the whole page just to update that detail? Either way it still works without JS, which can't be said about most modern websites.
"... which can't be said about most modern websites."
While I understand and agree with your point, I have personally found this quoted portion to be a false assumption.
To me, "works" means I can retrieve the content of the page without using JS. If the websites we are discussing are ones where the primary purpose is reading, like HN, most will "work" for me without JS, so long as I do not rely on try using a "modern browser" to retrieve the content. In fact, I cannot even think of a single website meant for reading that I cannot read without a Javascript-enabled browser.
I think you guys overreact a bit, your reply alone occupies more bytes than the CSS needed to implement dark mode; it wouldn't affect anything related to scrolling with space-bar, or fonts, or JS functionality.
True, serving it to you was negligible, but that little extra being served millions of times, once for every request, in aggregate slows down servers, eats up peoples’ data, raises costs and generally quickens the heat death of the universe.
It's a KB of css, if that, probably much less. Cached, in a stylesheet request, not a style element. It's nothing. It amortized, not more data for every request. It's nothing.
Ha, remember the first time they tried a mobile layout? That was quickly yanked (to much rejoicing). If the dark mode has some issues, we can always go back and try again. The main thing I care about is making sure it's still easy to read (good contrast).
Honestly theres a lot of other sites that would benefit from that too. A well written and maintained scraper for a bunch of popular sites may be worth a subscription for some bandwidth limited people.
A court recently ruled [1] that LinkedIn had to allow scraping, but it has to be public data (i.e. you can't log into your Facebook account and then scrape all your friends' pages).
It's not the scraping itself that I would be worried about, it's using this data to create what could be seen as a competitor (especially if you make it commercial). For a lot of these websites, traffic is essentially money: diverting users to another website using their own content would be very badly received
I was more thinking about a local web-app that consumes the site and then outputs it in a nice mobile layout, without actually archiving or saving anything.
When you click on a link to the news.ycombinator.com domain, what should happen if you prefer dark mode? And vice versa?
In comparison, the pure-CSS ideas that some people are posting would work automatically if your browser supports dark mode, and would enlarge the (cached with long ttl) CSS file only very slightly.
Unfortunately, there are some of us who also like the solarized type light mode in HN more than dark mode, but we use dark mode at the system level because the OS light mode is awful.
Pure CSS would be quite cool, but we'd probably also need a snippet of JS to add a button allowing to switch between light and dark mode. (There's probably a way to do it without JS that someone will hopefully comment too.)
While I agree with most of your points, I disagree with
> Doesn't play nice with password managers.
Check your password manager settings. Most have options to match on domain, subdomain, port or have the ability to set equivalent domains either globally or per credential.
How can you keep up with the news when HN only records the headlines and the articles are stored elsewhere, usually on extremely heavyweight news sites?
