One sentence of news, and the pill that failed contrast
Putting the orbit run above the header took four wordings, a revert after nineteen minutes, and a contrast check that only ran on the second site.
The homepage first carried the news as a line under the lede, then as a bar above the header, then as both, and then the line went, because it repeated the bar. The bar’s sentence began as “Mru Flight has now run in orbit on ESA’s OPS-SAT PRETTY satellite”, became “ESA has run Mru Flight on its OPS-SAT PRETTY satellite” two minutes later, lost PRETTY and its period in the redesign, and settled two days on as “Mru Flight ran in orbit on ESA’s OPS-SAT satellite”.
On phones the redesign flowed the pill, the sentence and the Read more link as one run of text. It was reverted nineteen minutes later, and the rule is now three lines below 720px, on every site that shares the stylesheet: pill, text, link, each at full width.
The pill is uppercase mono at 11px on the gold rule color, with the ink hardcoded. On the dark theme’s gold that is 8.08:1. The light theme’s gold is darker, so the same ink on it is 3.35:1, under the 4.5 that AA asks of small text. Nothing on the website had caught it. The docs site runs axe, and it failed the moment the bar was ported there. The pill text is now the card color: white on the light gold at 5.39:1, and the dark card on the dark gold at 7.61:1.
The port failed CI once more, on Prettier: the bar’s markup on one line is over 120 columns. It was wrapped over three lines, then put back on one with an ignore comment, in a commit titled “one line, as on mru.space”. The website’s own source has it on three.