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ProleWiki has rolled out a new sepia tone mode for your reading comfort. To try it out, simply click or tap on the gear icon in the sidebar, and select Sepia under the Color list. You will also need Javascript enabled to use it.
This theme option joins our long-standing Light and Dark Mode (with a True Dark mode accessible once you select Dark mode), always for the benefit of our readers. Currently, the sepia mode works as expected and is ready for public release but two issues have already been noted:
- It doesn't unload dark mode entirely when switching from Dark to Sepia. To that end, we recommend switching from Light to Sepia instead. We are in the process of fixing this.
- When reloading a page or moving to another page while sepia is enabled, the previous theme flashes on the page for a second. This is due to the implementation, and will be fixed once/if we move the theme to a more robust implementation.
Otherwise, the sepia mode works as it should: it saves across pages, remembers your preferences, and you can enable and disable it at will.
We hope you appreciate this new mode and will be happy to use it!
If you have any feedback to share about the sepia mode, please get in touch with us either on Discord, Twitter, or other socials.
Part of a large project to improve reading experience
In the future, we are looking to build on this base to propose a Reading mode, which will remove all distracting content from the page (such as the table of content, or most of the sidebar).
This is all part of a bigger plan, with no ETA yet, to improve the entire reading experience when it comes to reading long-form content, i.e. a long page (such as History of China) or books. More information will come out as we code it in.
Implementation
A little bit about the implementation. The theme was added in the list with Javascript, which is a client-side language. This means that it may take a second to load the Sepia option when you open the settings menu (gear icon).
When clicking on it, more Javascript code enables an HTML class over the entire page, which we then style using CSS. More Javascript code allows us to save the preference between pages, and make sure to properly load/unload any other theme as the user switches between them.
The issues we noted earlier, regarding delays in setting off the script, is because JavaScript applies once part of the page is loaded, but PHP happens before the page is served to the browser.
With that implementation, we are technically able to deploy more themes as we please to ProleWiki. For the time being though, we have no plans to bring more themes -- we want them to fulfill a purpose for the reading experience, not just look pretty -- but it will be very easy to do so if we want to.