0003-reduce-support-for-browsers-that-do-not-support-css-variables.md
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	# 1. Reduce support for browsers that do not support CSS Custom Properties

	Date: 2024-02-01

	## Status

	Accepted.

	## Context

	In order to develop night mode in a sustainable and performant way, the Web team
	decided to use CSS custom properties for all colors in the Minerva skin. This
	allows us to develop night mode by simply changing CSS custom property values.

	## Decision

	we will reduce support for browsers that do not support CSS custom properties,
	most notably Opera Mini.

	According to caniuse the main browsers this impacts are IE11 and Opera Mini:
	https://caniuse.com/css-variables

	According to https://github.com/Fyrd/caniuse/issues/3883 CSS variables are not
	available only in its non-default "extreme mode".

	According to the following stats:
	https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#mobile-site-by-browser
	Opera Mini represents 0.1% of traffic to the mobile site. Given this tiny
	percentage of traffic, the maintenance and performance cost of providing a
	fallback for older browsers is deemed too high (since it would involve
	increasing the CSS payload to the remaining 99.9% of users).

	## Consequences

	Browsers like IE11 and Opera Mini will degrade gracefully into a reduced color
	experience. Colors will fallback to the default user-agent stylesheet so links
	will be blue, text will be black and background colors will be white. Although this
	will be a grade C experience, it will still provide adequate legibility and
	accessibility for basic functionality (i.e. reading).

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