I have a visual disability that leads me to use Dark Mode 24/7, and Dark Mode software support is a major focus area for me.
All modern web browsers support
the prefers-color-scheme CSS media feature for automatically choosing a Dark Mode stylesheet.
However, many of the main GNOME websites do not seem to provide Dark Mode stylesheets, whether automatically chosen via
prefers-color-scheme or switched manually via a cookie or login preference. (The main exceptions seem to be the newer Docs, Gitlab and Discourse, which have a Dark Mode option for all instances by default.)
The most popular heuristic for automatic Dark Mode seems to be inverting the brightness or luminance channel of each CSS color (as well as background but not foreground images), while leaving hue and saturation as is.
Night Eye provides
a convenient tool for generating Dark Mode stylesheets, though the licensing is unclear, and the generated stylesheets do not include support for
prefers-color-scheme. Regardless, it may be a good place to start.
It is not clear to me which GNOME websites are based in this particular repository, but it seems to be the most applicable. If this is not the correct repository, I would appreciate if this issue could be copied or transferred as needed.
Details for specific website sections follow:docs.gnome.org appears in Dark Mode on my computer, but I don’t know whether that is due to
prefers-color-scheme or just the default regardless.
help.gnome.org does not provide any Dark Mode functionality. Most likely and Dark Mode CSS (using
prefers-color-scheme) would have to be manually incorporated into the existing stylesheets.
The main
gnome.org website (including
the GNOME Foundation website) says that it is powered by WordPress, and there is
a WordPress plugin that adds a fully automated Dark Mode (presumably using
prefers-color-scheme).
Gitlab’s “Nav” Dark Mode seems to be early enough in development that they aren’t comfortable setting it to switch by default, but there’s
an open issue on the topic.
Discourse seems to support setting automatic Dark Mode as the default, at least on fairly recent versions.
MoinMoin (the engine behind the GNOME Wiki) doesn’t seem to have a default Dark Mode feature, but there is
some limited discussion (from FOURTEEN YEARS AGO). Most likely and Dark Mode CSS (using
prefers-color-scheme) would have to be manually incorporated into the existing stylesheets.
As an aside, because a lot of the GNOME Wiki is out of date, and edits have largely been locked to prevent spam for quite some time, I personally think the GNOME Wiki should be ported to a Gitlab backend, which would allow for issues, pull requests and the like. There exists a tool for porting MoinMoin wikis to a Git backend. I should probably put this in a separate issue, though.
In there's any way I could help move this process along, please let me know!
