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Dark Mode Documentation

Give your site a dark mode your readers can switch on — one that reads properly on every page, without you restyling anything.

Appearance

How the page is darkened

Read the theme is the one to use. Every stylesheet on the page is read and re-coloured, which is why it works on a theme nobody has ever seen: photographs stay photographs, a coloured button stays that colour but darker, and text stays legible against whatever is behind it. It is about 38KB over the wire, fetched only once a reader chooses dark.

Invert the page is one CSS filter over everything. It costs nothing and runs anywhere, and it inverts pictures — corrected for anything in an <img>, and impossible to correct for a picture set as a CSS background. Suits a text site; on anything with a photographic header it will look wrong.

A plain stylesheet writes your four colours into the page and stops. No JavaScript at all after load, and no cleverness: it sets the page, the type, the links and the form controls, and leaves anything it cannot know about alone. The fastest of the three and the least faithful on a complicated theme.

The palette

Six to start from — Ink, Slate, True black, Warm, Midnight, Forest. Every one was checked for contrast before it shipped, so choosing one and changing nothing gives you a page people can read.

Under them are the four colours themselves. They start as the palette you picked; change any and the change is yours to keep, until you pick a different palette, which brings its own four. The preview beside them shows the numbers: 4.5:1 is the line for body text, and the preview says so rather than leaving you to guess.

Fine tuning

Brightness, contrast, warmth and colour drain. A hundred means "no change". The defaults are already a touch softer than a straight inversion, which is what stops a dark page glaring. Leave them alone unless something looks wrong.

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