Giles' blog

Blog design update

I was recently reading some discussions on Twitter (I've managed to lose the links, sadly) where people were debating why sites have dark mode. One story that I liked went like this:

Back in the late 80s and 90s, computer monitors were CRTs. These were pretty bright, so people would avoid white backgrounds. For example, consider the light-blue-on-dark-blue colour scheme of the Commodore 64. The only exception I can remember is the classic Mac, which was black on a white background -- and I think I remember having to turn the brightness of our family SE-30 down to make it less glaring.

When the Web came along in the early 90s, non-white backgrounds were still the norm -- check out the screenshot of the original Mosaic browser on this page.

But then, starting around 2000 or so, we all started switching to flat-panel displays. These had huge advantages -- no longer did your monitor have to be deeper and use up more desk space just to have a larger viewable size. And they used less power and were more portable. They had one problem, though -- they were a bit dim compared to CRTs. But that was fine; designers adapted, and black-on-white became common, because it worked, wasn't too bright, and mirrored the ink-on-paper aesthetic that made sense as more and more people came online.

Since then, it's all changed. Modern LCDs and OLEDs are super-bright again. But, or so the story goes, design hasn't updated yet. Instead, people are used to black on white -- and those that find it rather like having a light being shone straight in their face ask for dark mode to make it all better again.

As I said, this is just a story that someone told on Twitter -- but the sequence of events matches what I remember in terms of tech and design. And it certainly made me think that my own site's black-on-white colour scheme was indeed pretty glaring.

So all of this is a rather meandering introduction to the fact that I've changed the design here. The black-on-parchment colour scheme for the content is actually a bit of a throwback to the first website I wrote back in 1994 (running on httpd on my PC in my college bedroom). In fact, probably the rest of the design echoes that too, but it's all in modern HTML with responsive CSS, with the few JavaScript bits ported from raw JS to htmx.

Feedback welcome! In particular, I'd love to hear about accessibility issues or stuff that's just plain broken on particular systems -- I've checked on my phone, in various widths on Chrome (with and without the developer console "mobile emulation" mode enabled) and on Sara's iPhone, but I would not be surprised if there are some configurations where it just doesn't work.