The cornerstone of the layout was the least themeable thing in it. Measured before
touching anything, which is the only reason this is the right fix:
duck-dark radius=8px bg=rgba(255,255,255,0.12) border=rgba(0,0,0,0.25) blur=24px
plain radius=0px bg=rgba(255,255,255,0.12) border=rgba(0,0,0,0.25) blur=24px
So the RADIUS was already following `--radius` and I had been telling the owner
otherwise — the rounding in the Plain screenshot was something else. What did not
follow anything was the surface: three literal rgba pairs and a fixed `backdrop-blur-xl`
in the component.
Now:
plain radius=0px bg=rgb(255,255,255) border=rgb(0,0,0) blur=0px
Two distinctions the old code drew in literals are kept as tokens rather than
flattened, because both are real and a theme should be able to revisit them.
`--panel-raised-*` is the fullscreen surface: DENSER glass, not darker, because panel
chrome is dark text and a heavy dark fill hid every icon. `--panel-border-bare` is for a
panel with no header, which has nothing else separating it from what it sits on.
`--panel-blur` earns its place beyond theming: a flat theme was paying for a 24px
backdrop blur it did not want, and on a solid panel the compositor does that work for
nothing.
── A near miss worth recording ──
The first attempt silently changed nothing. The patch matched on four spaces of
indentation where the file has two, `str.replace` reported no error, the build
succeeded, and `panel-blur` DID apply — so the class landed while the surface did not.
It looked like a partial success and would have shipped as one. Caught by measuring
computed styles again rather than trusting the edit; the fix now asserts the
replacement changed the file.
950 pass / 7 fail unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>