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Welcome back and if you're new here, welcome to DESK! In case you missed my last essay "Objects of Affection", you can now read it here as online version. Please share it with friends or colleagues if it resonated with you. For this week, I got
Many new subscribers joined over the last week, welcome everyone to DESK (: In case you missed it: In my last essay I wrote about why we are taking steps backward in a world that keeps moving forward. From vintage Instagram filters to the resurgence of vinyl records, there's
⏱️ Average reading time: 4 minutes 🎵 Soundtrack of this essay: Listen here while reading It's a curious paradox: Scroll through your Instagram feed or peek at your own profile and you'll likely find pixel perfect, high-resolution photos deliberately aged and weathered with analog filters
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Ever used a website where you toggle from light mode to dark mode and the web site changes but the chrome around the browser doesn’t? To illustrate, take a look at this capture of my blog on an iPhone. When you toggle the theme from light to dark, note how the website turns white but status bar stays black. Only once I refresh the page or navigate does the status bar then turn white. When the user changes the theme on my site, I want it to propagate all the way to the surrounding context of the browser. In this case, to the status bar on the iPhone. Like this: There we go! That’s what I want. So what was wrong? A popular way to indicate the active theme is to put a class on the root of the document, e.g. <html class="dark"> <style> html { background: white } html.dark { background: black } </style> </html> Then we simply add/remove the dark class when the user toggles the theme. But that will only change the in-page styles. It won’t tell the browser to update the color of whatever ambient user interface elements its drawing. For that, you’ll need the meta theme-color tag: The theme-color value for the name attribute of the <meta> element indicates a suggested color that user agents should use to customize the display of the page or of the surrounding user interface. So when you respond to the user changing their theme, don’t forget to update the <meta name='theme-color'> tag in addition to whatever you do to modify the in-page styles. That’ll give you the effect you want in the surrounding browser UI (for browsers that support it). Oh, and it’s worth pointing out: don’t forget the color-scheme property either. That’s what will tell the browser to update other in-page UI elements it draws. So, when responding to a user preference to update a website’s theme: Toggle some global attribute that triggers style changes for all your custom, in-page elements. Set the color-scheme property so the browser draws the things its responsible for correctly (form controls, scroll bars, etc.). Set the <meta name='theme-color'> value appropriately so contextual browser UI can adapt to your site’s styles. I wrote this post as a friendly reminder, because friends don’t let friends forget the meta theme-color tag. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky
This brand creation for Southwestern Distillery is born from the legend of two nineteenth century Cornish brothers who spent all...
