Even if you never need to scale, Having light/dark & high contrast is just having basic features and complying to the law. If your site has 50 users it should have these, and this new light/dark switch is still inappropriate for even this basic use case.

What law? The U.S.'s Section 508 and other laws and regulations based on WCAG, don't require that sites honor `prefers-color-scheme` or to work correctly when `forced-colors` is active.

Nevertheless, it's a good idea to do so (though if a site honors `prefers-color-scheme` it should also have a setting so the user can choose to have that site not match their system's color scheme setting).

Very true! Nonetheless this approach would also break compatibility with `color-scheme`'s custom identifiers, which is just bad in general for CSS even for these small projects. The alternative proposal I put together here would allow this to scale and still provide a helper function for small projects to use: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/7561#issuecomment...

I appreciate that you not only have a nuanced critique but an alternative proposal as well.

I do like your alternative proposal.

For the viewers at home:

:root {

  color-scheme: light dark high-contrast;

}

body {

  background: scheme(light #eee, dark #333, high-contrast #fff);

}