The idea of dark mode has always been about contrast. There is a substantial
part of the population that dislikes the over-saturation of light as that makes
the non-light elements get pushed out. Imagine ink on a napkin, it bleeds out
and your text needs to be bigger and brighter to compensate.
So, for those people that dislike looking at bright sources, nightmode is a
solution. Overall light output is less and that helps contrast of text and
other details.
Unfortunately for this issue, there has yet to be a cartographer that actually
sat down and made a dark-theme. The map theme isn't just about contrast, as
inversion may solve, but the colors are actually really relevant for the
recognition of elements. Imagine if we inverted the colors of a flag, not a
good idea because the colors are quite relevant for recognition.
That red dotted line is a footpath, that blue one is a bicycle path. This is
learned, this should be super consistent if changed.
Based on this thinking I would totally reject the darkening of tiles, it
completely misses the point.
Additionally I would reject any auto-inversion of tile colors because that
would utterly destroy the design. That green on the map is reconizable as
forest and other things humans see as green. Water is blue. Train / tram lines
are black. Houses brick-colored. Inversion just doesn't give you a good result
if you just throw out the window all those intuitive and learned rules of what
the colors are.
To be frank, other than a super simple map style that just shows roads and
text, I've never in my life seen a good dark theme for maps.
I expect that it will take a lot of time to actually sit down and make one. And
to be honest, with many places on OSM being mostly green or gray (residential)
for background, I'd be surprised if it actually is needed at all.
To conclude;
1. Using dimming or auto-inversion is making things worse. Please don't.
2. A new theme may be designed that inverts some colors and not others to get
the best result. But this is a manual effort that I'm personally not asking for.
3. The normal tiles (identical to the light theme) work and look good. As a
long time dark theme user I'm not sure who asked for their colors to be fixed.
Why fix something that isn't broken?
ps. libreoffice in dark mode still shows white paper and black text. Apps like
inkscape and gimp obviously do too. If I go to Flickr com, all the photos are
still showing me the original colors.
What is the rationale that OSM should include the tiles in dark mode? I don't
think that is needed at all.
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