Tags: switch

My website has different themes you can choose from. I don’t just mean a dark mode. These themes all look very different from one another.

I assume that 99.99% of people just see the default theme, but I keep the others around anyway. Offering different themes was originally intended as a way of showcasing the power of CSS, and specifically the separation of concerns between structure and presentation. I started doing this before the CSS Zen Garden was created. Dave really took it to the next level by showing how the same HTML document could be styled in an infinite number of ways.

Each theme has its own stylesheet. I’ve got a very simple little style switcher on every page of my site. Selecting a different theme triggers a page refresh with the new styles applied and sets a cookie to remember your preference.

I also list out the available stylesheets in the head of every page using link elements that have rel values of alternate and stylesheet together. Each link element also has a title attribute with the name of the theme. That’s the standard way to specify alternative stylesheets.

In Firefox you can switch between the specified stylesheets from the View menu by selecting Page Style (notice that there’s also a No style option—very handy for checking your document structure).

Other browsers like Chrome and Safari don’t do anything with the alternative stylesheets. But they don’t ignore them.

Every browser makes a network request for each alternative stylesheet. The request is non-blocking and seems to be low priority, which is good, but I’m somewhat perplexed by the network request being made at all.

I get why Firefox is requesting those stylesheets. It’s similar to requesting a print stylesheet. Even if the network were to drop, you still want those styles available to the user.

But I can’t think of any reason why Chrome or Safari would download the alternative stylesheets.

I added a dark mode to my website a while back. It was a fun thing to do during Indie Web Camp Amsterdam last year.

I tied the colour scheme to the operating system level. If you choose a dark mode in your OS, my website will adjust automatically thanks to the prefers-color-scheme: dark media query.

But I’ve seen notes from a few friends, not about my site specifically, but about how they like having an explicit toggle for dark mode (as well as the media query). Whenever I read those remarks, I’d think “I’m really not sure I’ve got time to deal with adding that kind of toggle to my site.”

But then I realised, “Jeremy, you absolute muffin! You’ve had a theme switcher on your website for almost two decades now!”

Doh! I had forgotten about that theme switcher. It dates back to the early days of CSS. I wanted my site to be a demonstration of how you could apply different styles to the same underlying markup (this was before the CSS Zen Garden came along). Those themes are very dated now, but if you like you can view my site with a Zeldman theme or a sci-fi theme.

To offer a dark-mode theme for my site, all I had to do was take the default stylesheet, pull out the custom properties from the prefers-color-scheme: dark media query, and done. It took less than five minutes.

So if you want to view my site in dark mode, it’s one of the options in the “Customise” dropdown on every page of the website.

Chris has written about switching code editors. I’m a real stick-in-the-mud when it comes to switching editors. Partly that’s because I’m generally pretty happy with whatever I’m using (right now it’s Atom) but it’s also because I just don’t get that excited about software like this. I probably should care more; I spend plenty of time inside a code editor. And I should really take the time to get to grips with features like keyboard shortcuts—I’m sure I’m working very inefficiently. But, like I said, I find it hard to care enough, and on the whole, I’m content.

I was struck by this observation from Chris:

When moving, I have to take time to make sure it works pretty much like the old one.

That reminded me of a recent switch I made, not with code editors, but with browsers.

I’ve been using Chrome for years. One day it started crashing a lot. So I decided to make the switch to Firefox. Looking back, I’m glad to have had this prompt—I think it’s good to shake things up every now and then, so I don’t get too complacent (says the hypocrite who can’t be bothered to try a new code editor).

Just as Chris noticed with code editors, it was really important that I could move bookmarks (and bookmarklets!) over to my new browser. On the whole, it went pretty smoothly. I had to seek out a few browser extensions but that was pretty much it. And because I use a password manager, logging into all my usual services wasn’t a hassle.

Of all the pieces of software on my computer, the web browser is the one where I definitely spend the most time: reading, linking, publishing. At this point, I’m very used to life with Firefox as my main browser. It’s speedy and stable, and the dev tools are very similar to Chrome’s.

Maybe I’ll switch to Safari at some point. Like I said, I think it’s good to shake things up and get out of my comfort zone.

Now, if I really wanted to get out of my comfort zone, I’d switch operating systems like Dave did with his move to Windows. And I should really try using a different phone OS. Again, this is something that Dave tried with his switch to Android (although that turned out to be unacceptably creepy), and Paul did it ages ago using a Windows phone for a week.

There’s probably a balance to be struck here. I think it’s good to change code editors, browsers, even operating systems and phones every now and then, but I don’t want to feel like I’m constantly in learning mode. There’s something to be said for using tools that are comfortable and familiar, even if they’re outdated.