A dark theme carrying ihasmail.org's palette: a teal-navy ground rather
than the blue-slate of the plain dark theme, with the orange the logo's
cat is drawn in doing the work of the star and the warning colour. The
values are the site's own, read from its stylesheet rather than picked
by eye.
It is a theme rather than an accent because it changes backgrounds,
borders and text as well as the highlight -- an accent could not.
It rides on data-theme="dark" and adds data-palette="ihasmail" on top,
so the eleven dark-only rules further down the stylesheet keep applying
without being duplicated for a second dark theme. Specificity then does
something deliberate: the palette block is 0,2,0 and the accent variants
are 0,3,0, so a chosen accent still wins over it -- and because the
default accent ("teal") has no rule of its own, ihasmail.org's accent is
what shows until someone picks another. Verified both ways in a browser.
It is now what a new account starts on, so the app looks like itself
before anyone has chosen anything. Only a default: a stored theme always
wins, which leaves everyone already using ihasmail where they are, since
the setting is saved whether or not they deliberately picked it.
While here, the theme-color meta tag was fixed. There were two, both
carrying media attributes, and applyTheme looks for
:not([media]) -- so it matched neither and the browser chrome had never
followed the chosen theme at all, only what the OS preferred. One tag
now, updated from JS, starting at the default theme's background so the
first paint is right too.
Contrast measured rather than assumed, against the theme's own
background: text 14.5:1, muted 8.6:1, faint 6.4:1, accent 8.0:1, link
9.8:1, star 7.9:1, accent-on-accent 8.4:1. All AA or better.
Messages render on a white card in every theme. That is deliberate for mail
that styles itself, but #4 points out the case it gets wrong: a message with
no styling of its own has nothing worth preserving, and flashing white at
someone reading in the dark is a real cost.
Appearance gains a switch under the theme cards, off by default so the
current behaviour is unchanged. With it on, HTML mail that declares no
colours follows the app theme; mail that sets a background or text colour
still gets the light card it was designed for, because half-darkening someone
else's design is worse than leaving it alone. Plain-text mail already
followed the theme and is untouched by the switch.
The themed palette is expressed in the app's own custom properties, which
cross the shadow boundary, so switching theme repaints open messages without
re-rendering them, and the accent-coloured link stays consistent. The host
element takes color-scheme: inherit so form controls and scrollbars inside a
message match too.
htmlDeclaresColors covers bgcolor attributes, <font color>, and colour or
background declarations in style attributes and <style> blocks, while
ignoring near-misses like border-color and ?color= in a URL.
Closes#4
jcoffey-dev