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The Best Way To Dark Mode Your Website In My Opinion.

Mohammed Farmaan. on July 04, 2020

Dark mode has been there for a while now. From apps to websites, its influence on the people has been really great. It's no wonder why everyone wou...
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Christian | πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’»

Neat approach, I much prefer the CSS Variables method myself though as it means I don't need to juggle two (or more) colour themed CSS files

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Alex Chiu

second this, css variables can help reduce a lot of duplication and should therefore scale better.

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Terry

Too bad you still need a fallback for IE11.

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Christian | πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’»

Yes, for those that need to support IE11 it's a shame - I personally don't however, so I'm happy going forward with CSS Variables 😊

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Richard S Prins Jr. • Edited

Same, its to the point either IE needs to put in the necessary work to be more compatible with the rest of the world or just deprecated itself altogether. Its been a thorn in every web devs heel for decades now to deal with IE compatibility. Safari has done whats necessary to make things easier, why can't Microsoft. Edge was their answer to this and it made nothing any easier.

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SrΔ‘an MeΔ‘o • Edited

Devs just need to stop supporting IE altogether. Its ridiculous requirement in 2020 that someone needs IE.

Just let it die.

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Sirajul Muneer

Even bootstrap 5 is dropping support for IE11. It is time to move on. There is no meaning doing extra work to support an old browser.

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Terry

Yes, please. But commercially this is not (yet) an option in the real business world.

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Sirajul Muneer

That is were progressive enhancement comes handy. You need not always try to figure out a way for fitting a new feature in an old browser. If the browser dont support it, and if it doesnt add any functional and business value, dont bother providing the same for an old browser. Show website without dark mode in IE.

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Paulo Henrique

Totally agree, that is to use sense, and careful choose what you are gonna support or not, not being a religious in every decision

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Mohammed Farmaan.

Yeah sure. It just depends on the user's preference.😁

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Mohammed Farmaan. • Edited

Yeah I know. The other CSS file is basically a copy of the first one with a few things changed. And my main intention was to show the switch of files on a click. Anyways, at the end it still falls down to the dev preference on how to lay things out. And yeah, thanks for pointing things out.πŸ˜‡

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jumokee

I like this solution for one reason: it clicked in my head that tags are part of the DOM just like any other element and you can manipulate it with JS. Thanks! πŸ‘ </p>

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Mohammed Farmaan.

Glad it helped you in someway!πŸ˜‡

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Ben Sinclair

Won't this give you a flash of the light theme until the script has loaded on every page?

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Eddie • Edited

Ben is mostly correct. The page has to first "disconnect" the current CSS file and then load the second. This will cause a temporary moment when the page doesn't have a CSS file bound to it at all. It will be unnoticeable if the CSS files are small or if all CSS files have been cached locally, but you'll definitely see it if your CSS file is large, if you have multiple CSS files, or if your user's have higher latency.

There may be ways around this including possibly preloading the dark mode CSS.

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Mohammed Farmaan.

Yes that is true. For larger files, it'll take a while to fully load the other sheet but there might be a work around. As soon as I figure it out, I'll pen that one too. Btw, thanks for the point!

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Mohammed Farmaan.

No it doesn't. I even tried setting a transition, but it still worked smooth and fine.

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Terry

If using Javascript, why not simply add a class to the body, e.g. "dark-mode" and apply some basic styling overrides in your existing style sheet? No flashes, no new load#/HTTP requests, simply manageable if using a SCSS preprocessor

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Mohammed Farmaan.

Yeah we can do that too. But few elements will be left out and will need multiple classes to get dark.

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Amrit

Cool Hack.

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Mohammed Farmaan.

Yeah thanks!πŸ˜‡

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Ibrahim Abdullahi Aliyu

Cool, but there's a typo instead of
the function swapSheet(), it should be switchSheet() as described in the code

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Mohammed Farmaan.

Thanks. I didn't notice it. Earlier I used a function with that name for same purpose. So I mistyped it here.πŸ˜…

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suryadatta

An ever easier way is darkmode.js . Try it out

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Mohammed Farmaan.

Sure.πŸ˜‡

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Doublepicebs

Cool! One of my favorite methods is to set a main.css file, light-vars.css and dark-vars.css . Then use the same way you mentioned above to switch the variables sheet.

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shivlal kumavat

Great!!!

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Mohammed Farmaan.

Thank you!πŸ˜„

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Mohammed Farmaan.

Yeah it's cool. Well done!

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Uriel Bitton

Good stuff man!

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Mohammed Farmaan.

Thank you so much!πŸ˜‡β€οΈ

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Dev Prakash

Wow !!

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Deepak Raj

It's really useful.

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Tushar Pandey

wont work in react, or precompiled static sites like gatsby. This is definitely NOT the best way.

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Hussein Kizz

Wow! I have bookmarked your site and I wonder how you styled such a nice looking dark mode!

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Omie Onin

The title should be "Another way to Dark Mode your Website." or "In my opinion, the best way to Dark Mode your Website.".