The first version of this website had a theme switcher. It was implemented with CSS variables (and a bit of javascript). Then the javascript switcher was eventually removed, and the theme forced to be dark, but I kept the CSS variables just in case (read: I'm lazy.)

Edit: this is no longer the case. The current version of the website is yet another one, with a 100% rewritten (and pure) CSS.

The real reason I left the CSS variables was that I didn't wanted to use a CSS preprocessor (such as less or sass) to manage such a simple file (306 line, with blanks and comments). But, at the same time, I didn't want to copy-paste the colors everywhere.

Introducing the C preprocessor

The C preprocessor is a simple and well-known beast (sort of, at least), and it's included in the base system installation of most (pratically all, I presume) OSes.

If you have never used it, here's a quick howto.

You can define constants with

#define PI 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169

and use them whenever you like, for instance

double p = PI / 4;

The preprocessor is more powerful, it supports #includes and function-like macro (even variadic). But #defines are enough to manage a couple of CSS variables.

Now, let's see how this applies to CSS. Given a file with the following content

#define BASE1 #221635

body {
    background-color: BASE1;
}

we can compile it with

$ cpp -P file.css > a.css

and obtain a valid CSS file a.css.

Conclusions

It's weird. It's weird to invoke cpp to build a CSS files.

But it's also satisfying, in some sense.

As a conclusion, I would like to note that another option is to use m4, a general purpose macro language that should be present on every POSIX system. Unfortunately, I don't know the language very well, so I opted to cpp.