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| Creation |
 Title text: This xkcd.com update introduces a variety of new reading modes which can be activated through the menu. |
| < Previous April Fools' Day comics |
|---|
To experience the interactivity of the web page, visit the original comic!
Explanation
In this April Fool's Day comic, several new viewing modes have been added to the xkcd website, accessible through a drop-down list beneath the comic (not visible on Explain xkcd). This allows various different viewing experiences for the entire website, including older comics. Some are "normal" viewing modes, like the typical "light" and "dark" modes, but others take such things further and/or in more esoteric ways. This includes an "airplane mode" (see below) that parodies and subverts the normal implementation.
The accompanying comic references one of the first lines of the Bible (Genesis 1:3), wherein God creates light. Here, though, before God has a chance to fully appreciate their work, a person on Earth immediately requests an implementation of dark mode. Dark mode is a feature on many websites and devices which displays text in white against a black background instead of the default black text on a white background. In low ambient light this makes for a less intense viewing experience that is easier on the eyes, so many people who spend a lot of time looking at screens prefer dark mode (whereas casual users often find light mode easier to read). On OLED screens, another benefit is that because of the primarily low brightness of the screen, less battery life is consumed, which makes it useful for those who want to be energy-efficient or extend their battery life.
This demand represents a common experience for web and app designers, who spend a lot of time creating something that looks beautiful to them, and in their particular use case, only to find when it is put out into the wild that it doesn't suit the needs of many of their actual users, who don't particularly care about the effort they've put in.
Dark mode is not usually implemented on planets (although one could argue that night-time is effectively Earth's "dark mode", which could have been created by God as a response to the person). The comic deviates somewhat from traditional Judeo-Christian theology, as in Genesis the day/night cycle was created on the first day, but humans were created on the sixth day - thus, the "dark mode" (night-time) would already have been implemented by the time humans existed. Possibly the person is actually requesting a dark mode that can be toggled at will, rather than one which occurs automatically each day.
Unlike most comics, the title text contains no jokes, but rather explains the update and gives basic instructions.
The comic credits the "Excellent Design Team", consisting of Amber, Benjamin Staffin, and Kevin who helped create the modes.
Table of modes
| Mode | Description |
|---|---|
| Light Mode | The usual site experience. Typically, where sites have light and dark modes, light is the default option, so as to mimic ink on paper (such as printed newspaper comic strips). |
| Lighter Mode | The entire web page is filtered to look overexposed, making colors wash out and reducing the contrast. |
| Dark Mode | A standard "white content on black background" dark mode. Specifically, Dark Mode seems to invert the brightness of most colors (see comic 556 with dark mode enabled), but sets colors close to white to black, ignoring their original color (see comic 2342 with dark mode enabled). This inversion makes the content of this particular comic, with the original transition from a dark pane to "let there be light" panes and the subsequent request for this very feature, particularly nonsensical, as it seems to start fully bright, then darken as God creates light. |
| Darkest Mode | Everything on the webpage turns completely black (severely 'underexposed', in effect, the opposite to "Lighter mode" but also even more extreme). The exception is the drop down menu widget, which may appear as merely a dark gray β and depending upon the browser itself, the dropped-down menu may be its 'natural' appearance when it becomes fully active β which is of course extremely helpful for navigating back out of this mode or onward onto others. |
| Blurry Mode | Blurs the entire webpage. This is not conventionally desirable as it makes it harder to read text and interpret visuals. Whereas light and dark mode support can improve accessibility for certain vision conditions, this mode makes already poor vision even worse. |
| Grayscale Mode | Applies a standard grayscale/desaturation conversion filter to the entire webpage. Many devices provide a grayscale mode as one of their color filter settings, which can simulate different color vision deficiencies. Grayscale specifically can also help improve focus by preventing colors from catching the eye and making distractions less visually appealing. |
| Greyscale Mode | Operates identically to Grayscale Mode, but also changes the spelling of "math" in the slogan at the top of the page to "maths" (to go along with the respective British English use of gray/grey). |
| Dorian Greyscale Mode | Makes the webpage slowly turn grey, including darkening/fading-to-grey 'white' areas. This refers to The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the titular character has a portrait that slowly ages and fades out while the character stays young and handsome.
Of note is that the surname of the titular character is "Gray" (as is still common, if not dominant, in Britain), but the mode itself is named for the primary British/non-American standard English version of the word for such a hueless shade. No relation to the Dorian mode, a musical scale. |
| Space Opera Mode | Turns the entire page into a Star Wars-style opening scroll, which loops round until you change the mode. Scrolling the mouse scrolls up or down through the page content. |
| 3D Mode | Makes the comic render in anaglyphic stereoscopy. Randall has used 3D space before for another joke comic. |
| Origami Mode | Rotates and folds various pieces of the webpage, as if it were origami-folded. |
| Ink Mode | Recolors the webpage as if drawn in blue ink. |
| Spring Mode | Gives the comic a simple physics simulation, making it slightly rotate around an axis when the page is scrolled, and giving it a springboard look, hence the name. The axis around which the page precesses is perpendicular to the axis the user scrolls on. This means that when the page is scrolled vertically (the usual direction), the comic wobbles around a horizontal axis, but when scrolled horizontally (if your screen size or zoom allows it), the comic precesses about the vertical axis. |
| Antipodes Mode | Turns the entire webpage upside down. An antipode is the point on the Earth's surface directly opposite of another, but "The Antipodes" is also a term used to refer to Australia and New Zealand by inhabitants of the northern hemisphere. Note: When the comic was first published this was labeled "Southern Hemisphere Mode". |
| Hacker Mode | Recolors the entire webpage in the stereotypical green-on-black coding environment color scheme often used by hackers on film and TV. This visual shorthand is a holdover from early monochrome monitors that used P1 phosphor. (Modern terminal software has no such limitations, and many programmers today use syntax highlighting to color-code operators and keywords.) |
| Screensaver Mode | Makes the comic float around on the webpage, bouncing as it hits the edges. A common type of screensaver has some text or other element drifting around the screen in this way. Many people ended up watching such screensavers, waiting for the bouncing graphic to hit the corner of the screen. Like with Hacker Mode, there is an element of nostalgia to this; screensavers are less necessary on modern LCD screens, so fewer setups use them. |
| Modem Mode | Slowly reveals the comic top to bottom, as if slowly loading (but only in approximation) the way images often used to have to be progressively rendered from a low-rate stream of image data in the days of more limited dial-up connections and also a lower-performance Internet backbone in general. This is accompanied by audio of the sound of a modem communicating over such a connection. NB - this mode does not appear to function correctly/reliably for some viewers. |
| Stained Glass Mode | Fills each closed area of the comic with a separate color to mimic the look of stained glass imagery. The colors vary each time this mode is selected or the page is reloaded in this mode, which works by flooding a single pseudorandom hue over all areas of near-white, each flood bounded only by any sufficiently dark or saturated drawn line/border. |
| Airplane Mode | Makes the comic fly around on the page, with a "NYOOM!" written next to it, as if it were an airplane. This is unlike the usual use of "airplane mode" to refer to disabling the cellphone (or all radio frequency) features of a mobile device, as required on most flights. Of course, this Airplane Mode is likely not required on an airplane[citation needed]. |
| Boat Mode | Makes the entire webpage tilt back and forth, emulating the way a boat rolls on the water.
This is a reference to the longstanding mention of a Boat Mode in the footnote, which says "Remove your device from Airplane Mode and set it to Boat Mode". |
Transcript
- [Black background with white caption boxes.]
- Caption: And God said,
- Caption:"Let there be light,"
- [A bright explosion of light from a star in the center, with a white caption box.]
- Caption: And there was light.
- [The star with bright rays of light is shown against the horizon of a planet.]
- [The same planet horizon is shown with a clear sky above.]
- Caption: God saw that the light was-
- Voice from the planet: Can you add support for dark mode?
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