0.11.37 — a dot without alarm

A review of colours in the engine gave a short result: red occurred exactly twice, and both times it was the same dot. Small, in the corner of a glyph in the header, lit whenever something had arrived for the reader that they had not looked at yet. Both occurrences were written into the components by hand, outside the palette.

The palette does have a rule, and the rule is written down in the stylesheet: the only colour beyond grey is the tile that sends you somewhere else. Everything else is ink, paper and mist. The dot stood beside that rule — not because anyone had argued for an exception, but because the dot was made quickly and took the colour one reaches for without thinking.

That is the real reason for the change, and it matters more than tidiness in the palette. A red point in the corner of an icon is a sign lifted straight from services that hold attention through unease: you have unread items, someone is waiting, something is slipping away, come back now. The sign is so well drilled that it is read faster than whatever it sits on. The trouble is that here it tells a lie. Nothing is slipping away, nothing expires and nobody is waiting. Something arrived — that is all.

So the dot is ink now. It is visible thanks to the paper-coloured ring that separates it from the glyph, not thanks to shouting. A reader who misses it for three days loses nothing; that was the only function red served beyond plain visibility.

The change is one line in each of two files and alters no behaviour: the dot lights and goes out exactly as before. The release gets its own number because the engine has no collective numbers — but also because a decision about the colour of alarm is a decision about how a site speaks to its readers, and deserves an entry rather than a mention.