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The banner. It was a full-width bar with its own background and border, which
read as a second layer of chrome stretching past the content on both sides,
and because it reserved height at the top of the page it pushed the wordmark
out of the top-left corner and the icon rail down out of the top-right. It is
just the unit now, centred, sharing that line with both of them.
It is also thinner: a 468x60 full banner rather than a 728x90 leaderboard,
and 320x50 rather than 320x100 on a phone. Both are standard units. At 90px
the banner was deeper than the icon rail beside it, so it decided how far
down the whole page began; at 60px it is shorter than the rail and the
content offset is the rail's, not the banner's. The page below is unaffected
by whether an advert is there at all.
Below 980px the wordmark, the unit and the rail no longer fit on one line, so
the banner drops beneath them and the content clears both.
The mark. It was five shapes in a 32 pixel square: a chevron, an offset ghost
copy of that chevron, a full-width baseline, and a large filled block. That
is a drawing, not a mark, and the parts crowded each other so none of them
read. It is two shapes now, a chevron and the underscore cursor after it,
which is a shell prompt and the gesture anyone who has used a terminal
recognises.
The cursor blink faded to 0.15 opacity over an uneven 45/55 split, so it
ghosted rather than blinked. A terminal cursor is a hard square wave: fully
on, fully off, 530ms each way. Only the menu's title blinks now, because
something blinking in the corner of every screen is a distraction.
The menu title sat 16px right of the buttons underneath it. Centring the mark
and the name together as one box put the name off-centre, and the
absolutely-positioned mark overflowed the menu's padding, which moved the box
itself. It is a three column grid now, the third empty and the same width as
the first, so the wordmark is in the exact centre by construction with the
mark to its left. Measured 0px offset at six widths.
The corner wordmark is back on the menu. Leaving it off to avoid showing the
name twice made it look like it had gone missing, and it is the way back to
the menu from everywhere else, so it should be in the same place on every
screen.
Sound. The engine worked: one oscillator per keystroke, verified by counting
them. It was off by default and its only control was a line inside the
settings dialog, so the usual way to find it was to be told it existed. It is
a speaker in the top rail now, cycling off, click and mechanical, and it
defaults to mechanical. A browser will not start an audio context before a
user gesture and the first keystroke is one, so the first tone plays with the
first character: confirmed with a fresh profile under the default autoplay
policy, context running, six tones for six keystrokes.
The copies in the two settings panels are gone. One setting, one control.
3 browser tests pass, all 21 screen and viewport combinations clean, and the
margin rails still appear only above 1424px.
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Branding. The name was set in the body typeface and that was the whole of it.
There is a mark now: a chevron, a baseline, and a block cursor resting on it,
which reads as text being entered at a prompt and stays legible at 16 pixels.
The chevron is drawn twice, the lower copy offset and in the secondary
colour, which is the one stylistic note. The wordmark is split so the accent
falls on the second half. Everything is drawn in the theme's own variables,
so the mark follows the palette rather than carrying its own, and the
favicon is the same drawing.
The menu carried the name twice, as its own title and as the fixed corner
mark. The corner mark exists for screens with no title of their own, so the
menu keeps only the title, now the full lockup at size.
The settings panel. Measured at 1280x900 it opened at y=506 with a height of
437, so it ran 140px past the bottom of a 900px window, and .app is
overflow:hidden so there was nothing to scroll. It had no background either,
so the fixed footer links rendered through the middle of it and, sitting
higher in the stacking order, took the clicks: Playwright could not press the
panel's own Close button because the footer intercepted every attempt.
Both it and the custom text panel are dialogs now. Centred, opaque, above the
fixed chrome, scrolling internally, with the page dimmed behind them.
Their controls are buttons, but .quiet removes a button's border, so a panel
of them read as a list of plain text labels with nothing to suggest any of it
could be clicked. They keep an outline inside these panels. The checkbox was
the browser's default control in a panel where nothing else was, and its
border was too dark to see against the panel.
Escape did not close either of them. The handler looked for
.rail-settings-panel, which is a different panel on a different screen.
A Dev section with a button that jumps straight to the results screen with
invented figures was shipping to every visitor. It is limited to localhost.
The top rail. The account control has moved into the icon row, right of
Friends, and is the account's own picture once signed in: there is no avatar
upload, so it is the initial over a colour hashed from the whole username,
which gives every account a stable and distinct mark. Sign In and Sign Up sit
on their own row beneath. The friends count is a badge under its icon rather
than the words "2 online" beside it.
That took the rail from 307px wide to 189px, which is what had been
overlapping the wordmark by 75px at 390px. But it also made the rail taller,
which put the close button back underneath it, so the rail now publishes its
measured height and the content column starts below whatever that is. The
rail is one row signed in and two signed out, so this is not a constant the
stylesheet could hold.
The wordmark was inline-flex, which blockified its two halves, so the name
read as two lines to innerText: a screen reader, a copy-paste, or a test.
The advertising slot has moved from inside the results screen to a banner
across the top of the page, where a navigation bar usually goes. The header
moves down to make room rather than being covered by it. It stays off the
typing screen, the passive reader and the race lobby.
Custom text: the panel had no title, and its hint was centred at 340px inside
a 480px panel, which broke one sentence into three ragged lines.
3 browser tests pass. The store test now asserts the avatar replaces the
sign-in links rather than expecting a button that has moved.
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