Alexander Sandberg

Posted on Jun 24, 2019 • Edited on Jul 24, 2019 • Originally published at alexandersandberg.com

Creating a website theme switcher with CSS only

#webdev #css #darkmode #a11y

Check it out live before reading if you want!

So called dark mode layouts have been getting a lot of attention and hype lately, as more and more companies have implemented an optional design of their websites and products. I've personally been using macOS Mojave's dark mode since release, and I'm completely sold on it.

Ever since Safari released their new @media feature prefers-color-scheme, I've seen a lot of people experimenting with implementing this on their own websites. This new media feature - which is now supported by Firefox as well - gave us a way to automatically detect the user's preference with some simple CSS.]

What most, if not all, of these solutions have in common however, is the need for a tiny bit of JavaScript to switch between themes. With CSS Custom Properties, it's only a matter of listening for a button click and setting a dark-mode class or data attribute on <body>.

Buuuutttt… where's the fun in doing that when you can achieve the same thing with CSS only, am I right?? 🙌

The magic revealed

The secret behind the theme switching functionality is a simple checkbox, CSS's :checked selector, and the lovely subsequent-sibling combinator, ~.

For this to work, there are a few things we first have to do:

Wrap our themed page content in a container
Place the checkbox before and at the same level in the DOM tree, as this container

This means we'll doing something like this:

<body>
  <input type="checkbox" id="theme-switch">
  <div id="page">
    <!-- Insert page content here -->
  </div>
</body>

To make things a bit nicer and more fun, we'll also…

Add a clickable label to replace the not-so-fun checkbox

<body>
  <input type="checkbox" id="theme-switch">
  <div id="page">
    <label for="theme-switch"></label>
    <!-- Insert page content here -->
  </div>
</body>

The label is connected together with our checkbox by setting the label's for value the same as our checkbox's id. This means clicking the label will check the box. "But the label is empty?" I hear you say. Yeah, we'll get to that.

CSS Custom Properties

Although this would be possible without it, we'll use CSS Custom Properties (aka CSS Variables) to help us with the theming. Beware of the (pretty good) browser support for these.

We'll start by defining some colors for our two themes:

:root {
  /* Light mode */
  --light-text: #222430;
  --light-bg: #f7f7f7;
  --light-theme: #d34a97;

  /* Dark mode */
  --dark-text: #f7f7f7;
  --dark-bg: #222430;
  --dark-theme: #bd93f9;
}

Next, we'll define some new variables to store our theme colors, depending on which theme is selected. By doing it this way, using our theme variables later will be a lot more convenient, especially if you've got a bunch of CSS to manage.

:root {
  /* Light mode */
  --light-text: #222430;
  --light-bg: #f7f7f7;
  --light-theme: #d34a97;

  /* Dark mode */
  --dark-text: #f7f7f7;
  --dark-bg: #222430;
  --dark-theme: #bd93f9;
  /* Default mode */
  --text-color: var(--light-text);
  --bg-color: var(--light-bg);
  --theme-color: var(--light-theme);
}

/* Switched mode */
.theme-switch:checked ~ #page {
  --text-color: var(--dark-text);
  --bg-color: var(--dark-bg);
  --theme-color: var(--light-theme);
}

The default mode variables will be, you guessed it, used by default. In this case, I've set light mode to be the default theme, but the dark mode variables work just as well, if preferred.

And lastly, we'll find our magical theme switching functionality! 🦄

To explain the ruleset in plain English, it's looking for "a checked box of class .theme-switched, that has a sibling with the id page". Here we redeclare our previously defined default variables with our other theme's colors, in this case dark mode.

And that's pretty much it! Now we can use our variables to create CSS rules once, and let the theme switching technology do the rest.

But remember, one of the things we had to do earlier for this to work was to wrap our themed page content in a container. This means that you'll only be able to use your theme variables inside that container:

/* This won't work */
body {
  background: var(--bg-color);
  color: var(--text-color);
}

/* But this will! 🕺 */
#page {
  background: var(--bg-color);
  color: var(--text-color);
}

What about that empty label?

Since we decided earlier that we wanted to do something fancy ✨ with the theme switcher, now is the time. I won't go into detail how this works, as it's not required for the theme switching functionality, but let me know-in the comments or on social media-and I'll be happy to explain it to you!

First we add some new theme variables to show different switch labels depending on the active theme:

:root {
  /* Light mode */
  --light-switch-shadow: #373d4e;
  --light-switch-icon: "🌚";
  --light-switch-text: "dark mode?";
  …

  /* Dark mode */
  --dark-switch-shadow: #fce477;
  --dark-switch-icon: "🌝";
  --dark-switch-text: "light mode?";
  …

  /* Default mode */
  --switch-shadow-color: var(--light-switch-shadow);
  --switch-icon: var(--light-switch-icon);
  --switch-text: var(--light-switch-text);
  …
}

.theme-switch:checked ~ #page {
  --switch-shadow-color: var(--dark-switch-shadow);
  --switch-icon: var(--dark-switch-icon);
  --switch-text: var(--dark-switch-text);
  …
}

Next, we make our checkbox invisible while still keeping it in the DOM. display: none; won't suffice here, since this will put the theme switcher out of reach for visitors using keyboard navigation, and accessibility rules! ❤️

.theme-switch {
  position: absolute !important;
  height: 1px;
  width: 1px;
  overflow: hidden;
  clip: rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);
}

Then we add our icon and text to our label with the content property. I threw a text-shadow in there as well, as you can see.

.switch-label::before {
  content: var(--switch-icon);
  font-size: 40px;
  transition: text-shadow .2s;
}

.switch-label::after {
  content: var(--switch-text);
  color: var(--switch-shadow-color);
}

.theme-switch:focus ~ #page .switch-label::before,
.switch-label:hover::before {
  text-shadow: 0 0 15px var(--switch-shadow-color);
}

I added some more stuff to make it a bit prettier, but you can find that later in the source code if you want.

Remembering the selected theme

Now here's the deal… unless we're using Firefox*, we unfortunately won't be able to remember which theme was active after reloading the page, with CSS only. We need a little bit of JavaScript for that:

// This code is only used to remember theme selection
const themeSwitch = document.querySelector('.theme-switch');
themeSwitch.checked = localStorage.getItem('switchedTheme') === 'true';

themeSwitch.addEventListener('change', function (e) {
  if(e.currentTarget.checked === true) {
    // Add item to localstorage
    localStorage.setItem('switchedTheme', 'true');
  } else {
    // Remove item if theme is switched back to normal
    localStorage.removeItem('switchedTheme');
  }
});

*Firefox is actually caching checkboxes' value when the page reloads, remembering our choice.

However, we probably also want to remember the visitor's selected theme for when they come back another time. The above code will help us with that.

Live preview

If you didn't click the link in the beginning of the article, here's another that will take you to the live preview on GitHub. You can also find all of the source code on GitHub, in the project's repository.

When two themes aren't enough

Switching between light and dark is great, but what if you want a third or even fourth theme? Well what if we were to replace our single checkbox with a set of radio buttons instead - one for every theme?

Say no more (preview on GitHub).

This also requires some minor tweaking, other than adding radio buttons, that you can find in the source code.

However, for accessibility reasons, this method has its limitations when styling and placing the switch labels. You can read more about it in the preview linked above.

The bottom line

As we've seen, implementing a theme switcher with help of some clever techniques and CSS Custom Properties is not that hard!

The question is, if we need to use a little bit of JavaScript anyways to remember the user's selection for future visits, why don't we just add a few lines of JavaScript to implement the theme switcher as well?

Considering that a (very) small amount of people browse the web with JavaScript disabled, with this implementation they can be part of the fun too!

But most importantly, there's something really satisfying about solving problems with CSS only.

This post was originally published on my website at alexandersandberg.com.

Top comments (8)

Thomas Steiner • Aug 9 '19

Love the no-JS approach! You might also want to check out the custom element <dark-mode-toggle>, read more about it in this article.

Alexander Sandberg • Aug 11 '19

I came across your article on it last week. Some great stuff! 🙌

Alexander Sandberg • Jun 25 '19 • Edited

Really appreciate everyone showing so much love for my first webdev related article. It inspires me to keep writing and sharing more ideas with the community. ❤️

If you have any thoughts or ideas of your own, feel free to discuss them here!