Is it possible to use JavaScript to switch between light mode and darkmode on a page?

Question

I can use

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark)

or

window.matchMedia('(prefers-color-scheme: dark)').matches

to detect whether it's a dark mode the OS.

However, is there any way that I can modify the status on my own with JavaScript? So that I can create a button to let the users switch between dark and light if they don't want to keep the OS's settings.

Answer 1

Perhaps the easiest way to support dark mode is to define all of your color settings for text, backgrounds, borders, shadows, etc. for your light theme, and then use a media query to override the colors, but as you noted, that doesn’t give your visitor the option to switch.

To give your visitors a choice, you can add a small, unobtrusive switch to your page (some sites, such as GitHub display a switch on their desktop version, but to switch on a mobile device, the user has to open the Settings function).

What I do is I save the user's preference in localStorage and I follow the stored preference the next time they come back (even if they’ve changed their system setting).

For displaying dark mode, I add a dark-mode class to the documentElement (the html tag). In my CSS, I have a second set of CSS rule-sets:

body {
  background-color: #FFFFFF;
  font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif;
  color: #212121;
  font-weight: 400;
  line-height: 1.125em;
  height: 100%;
}

.dark-mode body {
  background-color: #121212;
  color: #ffffff;
}

Another option for switching the colors is to apply a data-color-mode="dark" attribute on the tag and using CSS variables:

:root {
  --background-color: #f0f0f0;
  --paragraph-color: #333;
}

[data-color-mode="dark"] {
  --background-color: #333;
  --paragraph-color: #ccc;
}

The CSS variables won’t work with Internet Explorer, so it will revert to IE’s standard colors.

As I still need to support IE9 and up, I don’t use the CSS variable option and, because I use an intersectionObserver based lazy-load, I don’t give IE users the option to switch the theme — they automatically get the light theme.

To make it work, I have the following code in my head section:

// IE doesn't get the dark mode option – I use IntersectionObserver as a proxy for IE
if ("IntersectionObserver" in window)  {
    window.dark = JSON.parse(window.localStorage.getItem("theme_mode"));
    if (window.dark === null) { // First time - use prefers color to set the theme
        if (window.matchMedia && window.matchMedia("(prefers-color-scheme: dark)").matches) {
            window.dark = true;
            document.documentElement.className = document.documentElement.classList.add("dark-mode");
        } else {
            window.dark = false;
        }
        localStorage.setItem("theme_mode", JSON.stringify(window.dark));
    } else if (window.dark === true) { // Returning user - prefers dark
        document.documentElement.classList.add("dark-mode");
    } // Returning user - prefers light - window.dark is false
} else { // Browser is IE - hide dark mode stuff
    document.documentElement.classList.add(" ie");
}

IE9 doesn’t support classList, but I optionally load a polyfill if the visitor is using IE9.

To set up the switch function, I have the following code at the bottom of my page:

// set the selector switch to the right setting
var modeToggle = document.getElementById("light-dark-toggle");
if (window.dark) {
    modeToggle.checked = true;
} else {
    modeToggle.checked = false;
}

    
modeToggle.addEventListener('change', function() {
    window.dark = modeToggle.checked;
    if (window.dark) {
        document.documentElement.classList.add("dark-mode");
    } else {
        document.documentElement.classList.remove("dark-mode");
    }
    localStorage.setItem("theme_mode", JSON.stringify(window.dark));
    lazyLoad();
});

Toggling the switch causes the page to reload the images, loading dark instead of light or vise versa.