Post

QQ about Dark Mode Toggles on websites How many options do you show to users? - Three values: System, Light, or Dark - Two values: Light, Dark (with one of them mapping to “System” behind the scenes). Why the one or the other? (I have an opinion about it, but I’m looking for external input)

Three values, follow system is quite different intent wise from picking a specific theme. If my system automatically changes at night to dark mode I want that behaviour. But also I light want this specific site to always remain light mode.

as a developer, same. as a (tech savvy) user, i really just want browsers to easily let me override prefers-color-scheme on a per-website basis

Yup user agents should give users some agency.

What a wild concept

Once browsers update the media query to reflect the page color-scheme, do you think there’s still a strong need to the User Preferences API? Toggling the color-scheme meta tag with JS will have a similar effect.

Yes for two reasons, I think the persistence will help make things work more seamlessly. But also there's more than just color scheme preference too so it's still useful for contrast, for example. Also fwiw I don't personally think that mentioned change is a great idea, but we'll see how it goes.

Because it breaks backward compatibility or are there additional reasons?