Design: Fix some glitches, and resolve some technical debt - #626
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Document the full screenshot loop in shoot.py
main.css is not processed by Tailwind and is unlayered, so its element rules
beat any utility for the same property. That made `text-gray-300` dead on every
dark panel: `p { color: gray-500 }` won, and all dark-panel body copy rendered
at 1.9:1 contrast instead of the intended 9.2:1.
Move only the `a`/`p` colour declarations into `@layer base`, so utilities (a
later layer) win. The `h1`-`h6` rules stay unlayered on purpose.
While here: link hover went *lighter* (purple-500, 3.8:1 — fails AA) and
`a:visited` used that same lighter colour, so visited links looked
de-emphasised. Hover now darkens to purple-900 and `:visited` is dropped. Body
copy moves gray-500 -> gray-600 (4.7:1 -> 7.5:1, and 4.4:1 -> 6.8:1 on the
gray-100 tiles, which failed AA).
- Homepage: the tile grid butted straight against the hero box (0px gap), because its container had no top margin while the hero has mt-6 sm:mt-12. - News index: ">> Read more" hung 24-48px to the left of the title, because the CTA sat outside the padded block holding the title and teaser. Title, teaser and CTA now share one column; the container gained gutters, so the date heading no longer touches the viewport edge on mobile either. - News and report pages: the date sat in <strong>, rendering Maven Pro 700 under a Playfair title. It is now a quiet, non-bold meta line. - Podcast index: the Interlude panel was five centred paragraphs with no spacing between them (Tailwind zeroes p margins and the wrapper had no space-y), plus <br> for line breaks. It is now one left-aligned block with real paragraph spacing, and the thanks/credits are a smaller second block. Content order changed: "follow the Interlude" now precedes the credits.
- .divide-y-2 in main.css set a border width but no colour, so it fell back to currentColor and drew black 2px bars between project leaders. Dropped in favour of Tailwind's own divide utilities on the one element that used it. - Event tiles laid out dates/location in a <table> whose <th> was right-aligned with no cell padding, so it rendered "Location:Rapperswil, Switzerland" with the label glued to the value. Now a two-column <dl>. - Six templates wrapped already-rendered Markdown in <p>, producing <p><p>…</p></p>; browsers auto-closed it into stray empty paragraphs. - The nav and footer logos now carry width/height so they no longer reflow the page as they load. The remaining images come from template variables, whose intrinsic sizes the template cannot know.
None of these did anything, and they made the templates hard to read: - "shadow-lg shadow-xl shadow-md shadow-sm" in 13 templates (16 occurrences): only the last one applies. Kept shadow-sm, the one that was in effect. - "border-gray-320" (19 occurrences in the mobile flyout) and "text-md" (2) are not Tailwind classes at all, so those borders never rendered. - "py-16 md:py-24 py-20 md:py-28 xl:py-32" on the homepage: two competing sets; kept the one that won at every breakpoint (measured: 80/112/128px). - "sm:px-12 md:px-12" (24 occurrences): the same value twice.
Links inside the bg-gray-800 panels and in the footer were purple-700 on near-black: 2.4:1, well under AA. They render light now (purple-200, ~10:1). This only became possible in this repo once main.css stopped overriding text utilities; see the earlier commit. The six footer social links were icon-only <a>s with no text, so screen readers announced the URL. They get aria-labels, and the decorative <span> is hidden.
dev.css is the checked-in Tailwind build that Hakyll concatenates for contributors without a Node toolchain. The preceding commits introduce utilities it does not contain (divide-gray-200, grid-cols-[auto_1fr], w-fit, text-purple-200, hover:text-white, mt-12/md:mt-16), so local previews would have silently rendered without them. Produced with `npm run build:dev-snapshot` from tools/tailwind.
dschrempf
changed the title
dev.css was a preview-only snapshot concatenated onto the Tailwind entry point (whose @import/@theme the browser discards), while CI built the real stylesheet separately at deploy time. Two artifacts, both writing _site/assets/css/tailwind.css, and Hakyll clobbered the npm build on every rebuild. Now assets/css/tailwind.built.css is the only artifact: checked in, unminified, constRoute'd to assets/css/tailwind.css, and deployed as-is. The watchers chain rather than race — postcss writes the built file, Hakyll copies it — so `site watch` plus `npm run watch` gives live reload with real CSS, no env var needed. Dropping cssnano costs 837 gzipped bytes and buys a file that can be diffed and merged. CI no longer builds CSS for deploy, so its drift check is now what keeps a stale stylesheet off the live site.
dschrempf
marked this pull request as ready for review
July 26, 2026 19:10
LaurentRDC
approved these changes
Jul 27, 2026
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This is some work towards slimming down the code affecting the design
For now, this doesn't change much, mostly fixing some glitches:
Homepage: the tile grid butted straight against the hero box (0px gap), because its container had no top margin while the hero has mt-6 sm:mt-12.
News index: ">> Read more" hung 24-48px to the left of the title, because the CTA sat outside the padded block holding the title and teaser. Title, teaser and CTA now share one column; the container gained gutters, so the date heading no longer touches the viewport edge on mobile either.
News and report pages: the date sat in
<strong>, rendering Maven Pro 700 under a Playfair title. It is now a quiet, non-bold meta line.Podcast index: the Interlude panel was five centred paragraphs with no spacing between them (Tailwind zeroes p margins and the wrapper had no space-y), plus
<br>for line breaks. It is now one left-aligned block with real paragraph spacing, and the thanks/credits are a smaller second block. Content order changed: "follow the Interlude" now precedes the credits.