standard.mode.place

Make a theme

Every field below is one value in the standard, no more, no less. This page is wearing what you're editing as its default, so the ground it rests on changes around you as you go. The panels stay put: they say entity, and yourdefault isn't theirs to take.

Started from

Until you pick one, this page is wearing the draft below, yours, from the last time you were here. Picking one replaces every value with that theme's, so you're always editing real values rather than filling in blanks.

Color

Twenty-one values: what a thing is for, and its background, foreground and border. Either every one is filled in or the whole aspect is left out: an app can't use half a set, so a half-filled one won't save.

surface.auxiliaryThe page itself, and everything sitting on it rather than above it — cards, bars, panels. The layer a theme is mostly made of.

background
foreground
border

surface.secondaryA surface over the page, not instead of it: flyout, menu, popover.

background
foreground
border

surface.primaryA surface that interrupts the page: modal, dialog, alert, sheet.

background
foreground
border

action.auxiliaryThe quietest choice.

background
foreground
border

action.secondaryA supporting choice.

background
foreground
border

action.primaryThe one thing the screen most wants you to do.

background
foreground
border

controlForm fields. No priority — all controls are peers.

background
foreground
border
The box takes any color CSS understands: #1c2540,oklch(0.7 0.15 250), color-mix(…),transparent. The picker only speaks hex, so if you type something it can't show, your text is left exactly as you wrote it.Emptying a box doesn't hand the value back to this site. An empty value is still a value: it lands in the same place a real one would and wins the same way, and CSS then drops whatever property asked for it: a background goes transparent, text takes the color it inherits. That goes for every value here, typography included. To get ours back, type something in, pick a starter again, or turn the whole aspect off with the switch above, which is the one thing that really does leave the value unsaid.

Typography

Twelve values, at three levels of prominence. Color isn't here on purpose: text takes its color from the surface it sits on.

text.primaryHeadlines and titles.

size
weight
lineHeight
family

text.secondaryBody copy — the text a page is mostly made of.

size
weight
lineHeight
family

text.auxiliaryDetail and help: captions, hints, legal.

size
weight
lineHeight
family
Any CSS font stack works. Fonts of your own (a file that travels with your account) aren't in the studio yet; the code path handles those today.

The record

Exactly what would be written to your account, checked against the standard's own schema, and for whether each aspect it carries is filled in, before it goes anywhere. The line below is the same test Save runs, so anything it objects to is something Save will refuse.

This theme

The only field apps ever look at. It's the theme's address — a page says “this part is dark” and your dark is what lands there, on an exact, character-for-character match.

  • default — your everyday look, the one apps reach for first.
  • dark, light, critical — shared words other people use too, so yours lines up with theirs.
  • com.yourname.zine — namespaced, for a look that's yours alone.

Your account holds one theme per address, so saving under a new one saves asecond theme rather than renaming this one.

More on naming

What you call it, in a list of your themes. Say anything you like, change it whenever, use spaces and capitals. Apps are told never to match on it — that's the address's job — so it can't break anything.

A sentence for whoever reads it later, including you. Also for people, not machines: nothing renders differently because of it.


Save it to your account

Saving writes the record to your own AT Protocol account. We ask your provider for permission over this standard's theme records and nothing else — and we never see your password.

In another app

Chatter

Ada Lovelace

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Ada Lovelace

@ada.example · 2h

Spent the morning teaching a machine to weave patterns. It has no idea what it's doing and neither, entirely, do I.

Grace Hopper

@grace.example · 5h

It's easier to ask forgiveness than permission. Ship the compiler.

14 replies · 92 reposts

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The Quarterly

In this issue

The weaver's argument

Cards, and what they knew

Correspondence

The weaver's argument

By A. Lovelace · Eleven minutes

A loom does not understand the cloth. It understands the card, and the card understands the pattern, and somewhere between the two a picture appears that nobody in the room has ever seen before.

The instructions are not the thing. They are the argument for the thing.

What follows from that is unreasonable, and it is also the whole trade: describe the intent well enough and the machinery will find the picture on its own.

Filed under: machinery, patterns, arguments

Get the next one

One issue a quarter. No more than that.


Not a preview: this page is already wearing your theme, and so is this. What you can't see by looking around you is the same look landing in a layout that isn't ours, which is what these are for.It's also where three of your values show up and this page's chrome doesn't use any: a flyout is the secondary surface and a modal the primary one. They start out of the way, and each comes out to meet you as soon as you put the cursor in one of its values. Everything else here, this page included, is theauxiliary surface, the one everything rests on.

What this site stores

  • Your draft: in this browser, until you clear it.
  • Your sign-in key: in this browser, generated here, never sent anywhere.
  • A copy of your default theme: in this browser, so every page here can wear your look without waiting on the network. It's a public record of yours either way, and signing out throws it away.
  • Your themes: on your account, which is yours to change or delete.

Nothing on our servers, because we don't have any: this site is a folder of static files.