I think Gwern.net lends itself somewhat more to the maintenance burden being small. As one example, LessWrong for much of its UI leverages half-transparent images that fade to a white background. Making them be harmonious for dark mode basically means making two images each time.
For example, see this Sequences Spotlight in dark mode:
The image borders are exposed, and the white fade does not work. Compare to the fully functional light mode:
For most things like this we have a pass that tries to edit the images to properly work in both light and dark mode, but it requires a decent amount of artistic judgement each time.
The image borders are exposed, and the white fade does not work. Compare to the fully functional light mode:
To be honest, I don’t like the light-mode example either. I think it’s bad to have your text visibly overlapping like that. (If I made an image which I had put .float-right .outline-not on to get the same effect on gwernnet and I saw your ‘good’ white-mode version, I would be immediately complaining to Obormot about his CSS being busted.) So in this example, isn’t a lot of the problem that the UI elements are overlapping so the text is spilling over onto the scales and blocking the wires etc, and the dark-mode merely exacerbates the problem and fixing the core problem would also fix the dark-mode issue?
Nah, the problem isn’t the UI elements overlapping the text. I just happened to choose an image that also had other issues. You would still end up with an ugly fade and a harsh transition unless someone noticed in time and uploaded a new image, even if the image was more properly placed on the right edge of the spotlight item (and separately, I think the image overlapping a bit with the text is basically fine and I consider it less of an issue, but that seems orthogonal to the point).
I think Gwern.net lends itself somewhat more to the maintenance burden being small. As one example, LessWrong for much of its UI leverages half-transparent images that fade to a white background. Making them be harmonious for dark mode basically means making two images each time.
For example, see this Sequences Spotlight in dark mode:
The image borders are exposed, and the white fade does not work. Compare to the fully functional light mode:
For most things like this we have a pass that tries to edit the images to properly work in both light and dark mode, but it requires a decent amount of artistic judgement each time.
To be honest, I don’t like the light-mode example either. I think it’s bad to have your text visibly overlapping like that. (If I made an image which I had put
.float-right .outline-noton to get the same effect on gwernnet and I saw your ‘good’ white-mode version, I would be immediately complaining to Obormot about his CSS being busted.) So in this example, isn’t a lot of the problem that the UI elements are overlapping so the text is spilling over onto the scales and blocking the wires etc, and the dark-mode merely exacerbates the problem and fixing the core problem would also fix the dark-mode issue?Nah, the problem isn’t the UI elements overlapping the text. I just happened to choose an image that also had other issues. You would still end up with an ugly fade and a harsh transition unless someone noticed in time and uploaded a new image, even if the image was more properly placed on the right edge of the spotlight item (and separately, I think the image overlapping a bit with the text is basically fine and I consider it less of an issue, but that seems orthogonal to the point).