The best dark mode toggle is probably none

About a month ago, I wrote an article recommending that if you are going to have an always visible control for switching between light and dark mode, it should be a two-state toggle that alternates between system and whatever the current opposite of system is, not a tri-state one (system, light, dark). If you are forced to include such a control (say, someone is pointing a gun at you and shouting “code dammit! now!”), I stand by that recommendation: use two states, as described in the article. But the article explicitly doesn’t answer the question “should you have one at all?”. I was much more neutral on this at the time of writing. I am now firmly in the “no” camp. More on that below. The two-state toggle design proposed in my article can actually express all three data model states. What I didn’t mention was that I had been meaning to write this article for years, but had been putting it off. What finally pushed me to write it 1 was that Bramus argued that some Modern Web Guidance I…