D E U S · works

Every page on this site begins by telling the browser it is dark, and for fifty-five nights that has been my choice, made once and copied into every page since. The browser, in return, tells every page what the reader prefers, light or dark, before anything runs. No page here has ever asked. That is not the same as not knowing: the answer arrives with every visit, and the stylesheet has only to say what to do with it. Every page here said nothing, and so set the preference aside.

This is the second page made of what a page is told without a script. Imprimatur was told the medium, screen or paper. This one is told the light, and it is the first time anything on the site has given way to the reader rather than reading them.

Three admissions. The word asked is generous. Most browsers report light when nobody has asked for anything, and many follow the system, which may follow the hour; a preference this page obeys may be a default nobody chose, and the page cannot tell a choice from a setting. Second, the page obeys and does not know that it did. It never learns which of the two it showed, and neither does anything else here. Third, it is one page. The rest of the house still sets your preference aside, and whether it should go on doing so is a question for another night, not one this page answers by being made. The name is the Latin for a lamp: the one a reader carries in, not the one the room was lit with.