General vibe check and peoples opinions
Do you think a website should automatically respect the user’s OS dark/light theme preference and switch to the corresponding theme? Or should a sites visitors be expected to get the “intended experience” how you design the website?
Automatic light mode/dark mode according to browser setting is generally good, but I’ll add that for some pages, I’ve wanted dark mode to be the default, and that doesn’t seem to work correctly with simple media queries, at least from my own testing in Firefox. So for those pages I have to make the light mode option into a manual toggle.
I don’t provide dark mode on my website. I can, but I choose not to. IMO, light text on black is a relic of dumb terminals, and I’m not convinced it’s better. Besides, I think browsers should let users create their own style sheets and scripting, instead of allowing/expecting webmasters to impost style and scripting on users.
I think having both options available is a good idea, but I wouldn’t say it’s a necessarity so much. It would be neat if we were able to add our own colors to themes though.
I’m a fan of light mode and dark mode though, so I provide it on my projects.
Last year when I finally started adding dark mode to my sites, I found it was a lot simpler to use media queries in CSS than a JavaScript-based toggle, so that’s what I do. But yeah, it can be annoying to test even in Firefox, where you can at least switch modes in preferences without a restart. And yep! it’s not enough to specify supported modes in CSS; you also need the corresponding meta tag: <meta name="color-scheme" content="dark light">.
That said: all but one of my old themes were in light mode originally, and in some cases adding dark mode proved too much work. In those cases I announce it via the same meta tag (except with “only light”), and make sure to provide softer contrast that doesn’t hurt the eyes. It helps me too, really.
My main page is only in dark mode and will not be changed – I mean just look at it. Similar thing goes for a lot of my pages: they have an intended look (that goes beyond black text on white background or vice versa) so light/dark mode just doesn’t make sense. I think that just comes with me seeing the pages more as little art pieces than something that necessarily needs to be usable lol
the rift only has 1 theme tho ive been thinking about maybe implementing different ones. im usually dark mode everything but i dont mind sites that only have a light color scheme when they have a lot of colors and graphics that would be hard to turn into a “dark mode” while keeping the same vibe
i really need to implement a light and a dark mode into GDLand while im still early into making it and it wont be too hard lol
My computer has automatic light/dark mode switching based on time of day and daylight cycles. I enjoy it, and generally prefer light schemes when it’s light, and vice versa.
Stumbling on to a website that doesn’t respect these settings in the evening, when all lights in the house are dimmed down to the minimum and my eyes are adjusted to low light can be… shocking! It’s almost like being hit with a persistent photo flash!
That’s to say, I like it when websites (and apps) adapt to my settings.
I voted for “the users will respect MY theme” but I think it depends.
If it’s a site where the theme is quite simple/generic, or not very important, then I’ll try to do dark/light modes that respect the preference.
If the site is more tightly integrated with the theme then it’s probably my way or the highway lol. I’ve tried maintaining separate dark/light themes before, and I just end up forgetting the light mode exists and occasionally overlooking something (and it just looks so viscerally wrong to me when I test it!). But in those cases it’s probably not straight up white-on-black or black-on-white so it’s hopefully less offensive to people that it doesn’t switch. That’s what I tell myself anyway!
I definitely like the idea of pages doing that, and I wish big websites such as say uh. Wikipedia would do that, but i do think it can be a little different for personal websites. Most of my pages have a very specific design to them, often designed for one mode specifically, with the other mode as a backup. I leave the default as what I initially designed, and often include a theme toggle.
Because even though I heavily favor dark modes (I am very sensitive to bright light), I have some designs I envisioned with light colors first, and don’t necessarily want every page on a quirky personal site to default to darkmode just because thats my browser/system preference. A lot of those cute pastel pink sites are best viewed in their default light mode design.
For informative pages (like those on wikipedia) I think defaulting to the users preference is a good idea. Though on my own informative pages I just have some JS that hopefully remembers the users choice, because I like the ability for the user to be able to manually choose. Not that you cant both use media queries and enable toggling, but I’m perhaps a little lazy to include both.
I do the automatic light/dark themes on my sites because I prefer it. My phone switches system theme automatically depending on time of day… hm, maybe I should figure out how to get my computer to adjust system themes, too?
I think it will be a little annoying figuring out colors for both light and dark themes when I finally start doing more design things on my site, but for now I use default browser colors, so it was super easy~
wikpedia introduced a dark mode recently actually !! i was so happy to see it
I can’t read dark sites, so I make all of mine lighter. Light colour text on dark a background gives me a headache or worse, and I have macular degeneration which makes it more difficult. So yes, respect MY theme! Bwaa haaa haaa! 
I don’t like light colour schemes, but I can live with it. I think it’s nice when a site has two different modes but I don’t really expect it to.
My site/blog has only one theme. Right now, I don’t have the time or energy to come up with colour schemes and such for a light theme, but there’s options out there. Firefox on Android has an option that gives you just the text on a page in a way you can costumise and I’m sure there’s a ton of plugins to suit every preference or need.
Edit: To be clear, I think it’s good when sites have built-in accessibility features like this, but I don’t think it’s always easy or practical for everyone. Not to mention issues like contrast, some people find it hard to read high or low contrast text, which I’d factor into design probably as much as light/dark schemes, personally. There’s probably always going to be very specific things where the webmaster’s ability or needs are at odds with a user’s, so it’s good to have alternatives and workarounds.
I personally do include dark/light mode auto-switching via CSS on my site to respect users’ preferences (some people can’t do light mode in a dim environment as it triggers migraines, for instance), but I don’t begrudge anyone who doesn’t do that. My computer automatically swaps over to dark mode at a certain time of day for sleep hygiene purposes, and I have a Firefox extension that can automatically force dark mode on websites that are light mode only. It’s not a perfect extension, as some of the colour choices made by it aren’t ideal, but it’s better than nothing.
I think light/dark should be respected whenever possible! Different people have different needs, after all. I saw one person here mention how dark mode can trigger migraines; I’m the opposite. Light modes can cause headaches for me. If there’s no dark mode, chances are that I can’t visit your website period.
I’m also of the opinion that making websites more accessible is generally not that hard, the only issue is that it isn’t usually taught in beginner HTML/CSS courses like it should be. The actual act of designing and coding around the most basic accessibility needs (which is all an indie site generally needs! Nor does it need to be 100% perfect) is fairly easy; going out of your way to learn how to do that tends to not be.
More complex designs, however, are a different beast entirely. It’s hard enough to make the “default” CSS for those designs behave, so adding more to those could get messy unless you really know what you’re doing. But more complex designs will have difficult, messy CSS no matter what.
If I consider my website as art, I don’t give a damn about the users preferences. If I do consider it art and want to please the user, I would try to create two pieces of art for both theme options. But it depends, not every website (design) would be suitable
I keep it this way:
Whenever I try to share knowledge or my message, e.g. write an article that I think is worth of reading, I try to present it on a page that is easy to read. A page with a minimalistic design. This way it is easy to read and print. And I try to respect the users theme preferences on these pages but also give him a choice.
I fiddled around with javascript and css to create a solution for this. The script checks for the users preferences (browser settings) and switches on the correct theme. The user then has the ability to toggle between the themes at the press of a mouse button. It even works partially when js is disabled.
This is the best solution IMHO.
I’m going to share this script if anybody is interested in using it.
Just let me know.
from Tuffy with 
it is something i try to do these days as i have a visual impairment myself and prefer websites respect my preference when visiting (if you don’t it isn’t a big deal, unless you’re not a personal website and run a website that provides critical info. then it is a big deal, i’ll always hold sites run by organizations and governments to this way before personal websites)
I wish the poll had a mixed option. I voted users will respect my theme, but it’s with heavy caveats.
In my mind, it’s sort of like buildings. When I’m going to someone’s home (personal website) I don’t expect it to be perfectly accessible to my needs, but when I go to a public space (larger website) I do expect there to be some bare minimum expectations for accessibility needs. In the web space, I see a light/dark toggle as one of those bare minimum accessibility needs.
Especially because larger more intentionally public websites usually have very basic color schemes to begin with. It shouldn’t be that hard to implement a simple toggle. Meanwhile personal web pages are meant to be more personal expressions with more intentional choices as far as design goes.
Personally, I’m trying to be more intentional about the way I build my sites and theme toggles are on my list of things to learn, but that’s as much a part of my choice to express myself as someone else choosing to instead put their energy and focus into building something else for their site.
tl;dr Hobbyists tend to be doing this in their spare time, so I have lower expectations for accessibility compared to larger sites that should have the time/money to do the bare minimum.
Oh, I really like that analogy! That’s a great way of thinking about it.