@papush I use both and at night, 0% brightness plus dark mode is still better than 0% brightness and light mode.

@volpeon it's not

@papush It's subjective

@volpeon 0% brightness would be your screen completely off, studies have shown black on white text is more readable, and i would guess astigmatism makes dark themes much worse too

@papush

On any screen I've ever used, 0% is the dimmest level it supported rather than off. I'm not sure what this even has to do with the topic at hand.

With such studies, their setup is important. Was it in a bright environment? Then I'll definitely agree because on dark surfaces reflections become very visible and make it hard to read text.
But in a dark environment, looking at spots with high brightness causes more eye strain than during the day, when such spots more closely match the levels of your environment. Dark mode minimizes the areas with lots of light.

I'm sure there are also eye conditions where dark mode works better than light mode.

@volpeon dark mode minimizing areas with lots of light is what makes it unreadable for me. it's like cars with bright LED headlights at night. the dark background tricks my eyes into adapting for a very low light environment and the white letters just become overly bright in contrast.
with light mode my eyes don't get tricked and adapt for the correct, real brightness of the screen and letters are perfectly clear.

also i did once have a laptop that could go down to having its backlight entirely off and it was the best, most screens are just quite bad and it's especially annoying that with some of them you have to go through five submenus to change something that should be as easily accessible as volume on a speaker

@papush

the dark background tricks my eyes into adapting for a very low light environment and the white letters just become overly bright in contrast.

Is this with low screen brightness applied as well? Because yeah, dark mode with high brightness is a miserable experience, but dark mode + low brightness has been the best setting for me.

Anyway, all of this just shows that having option is important. The nginx PR made correct points about eye strain from my personal experiences, but the meme at the end is the kind of "ew light mode" shit I can't stand either.
The nginx dev still is insufferable for prioritizing his personal use-case and pulling reasons out of his ass to justify it. Adding the tag is just a flag to enable compatibility, and people who don't want dark mode will have their browser/OS configured to not use it, so neither will the error pages for them.

@volpeon haven't looked at the nginx devs' replies tbh.
i get remarks by annoying coworkers about using a light theme on like a weekly basis. often times when i share a screenshot too. and of course you can never say anything back because then you're the annoying one who can't take a joke.
ofc it's a matter of preference and it's a now widely supported web standard so it's still dumb to not implement it, especially if it's just one line

@papush I'm sorry you have to deal with such idiots. ​​
I had to deal with that type at uni, except it was "ew Windows" because I was using some cheap Baytrail tablet that couldn't run Linux. Holy shit, they pissed me off so much.