SubHeaderBar switched to ArcBackground variant="rect" (commit 207794e7)
when navigation was restyled with V-angled bars, but 15 pages still
rendered a 20px ARC_OVERHANG_PX spacer div directly below the tab bar
to leave room for the now-removed downward arc. That spacer is the
empty band the user reported underneath the tabs.
Drop the spacer divs and their now-unused ARC_OVERHANG_PX imports across
Feed, Search, Notifications, Profile, Videos, Photos, Relay, Letters,
Music, ExternalContent, ArticleEditor, PeopleListDetail, BadgeDetail,
Communities, and Badges. FollowPage keeps the import because it still
renders an actual <ArcBackground variant="down" /> at the top of its
profile feed scrollbox.
Lets users post either to the global Nostr feed (kind 1) or to one of
the country communities they follow (kind 1111 rooted on the country
ISO 3166 identifier, mirroring the country page's compose flow).
Layout choices that ended up sticking after iteration:
- Dropdown lives on its own row above the toolbar so the 'Post to'
label can anchor its semantic meaning without competing with the
attach / emoji / mic / poll icons below.
- Trigger renders only the flag emoji to stay compact on mobile;
the open list shows flag + country name so options remain
distinguishable.
- A small help popover next to 'Post to' explains Global vs. country
community for users new to the concept, with the second item's
flag swapping to the currently-selected (or first followed)
country so the explanation feels tangible.
- Toggle only renders when the user is logged in, followed at least
one country, isn't replying, and isn't in poll / customPublish mode.
Resets to Global after each publish so country-mode never sticks
silently across posts.
The gradient surface, ring, shadow, and country label were doing too
much work now that the flag backdrop carries the visual weight of
'this is a country post'. Reduce the pill to just the flag emoji
inside a Link with a hover scale and the existing hover-card preview.
Cleaner read in the card header; the eye sees flag-backdrop fading
into the body of the post, then a clean flag emoji as the
right-anchored 'tap to go to country feed' affordance.
The giant blurred emoji fallback never quite matched the eventual
Wikipedia flag image visually, so when the network was slow the card
would visibly swap from emoji to image. Replace the fallback with the
sampled flag-color gradient (already used by the country pill via
useFlagPalette) which matches the upcoming image's color palette
closely and shares the same opacity/mask shape — so the eventual swap
to the real flag image is seamless.
Also wires the flag-mode foreground treatment through both NoteCard
layouts (normal + threaded): when the backdrop is active, the action
header + author row pick up white text with a strong text-shadow for
readability against the dark wash. The country pill stays scoped out
of that flip so it keeps its own gradient surface.
Includes prior tweaks from this arc: full-width flag banner, taller
backdrop area (h-64 / h-72), mask-image bottom fade, increased dark
wash for text contrast, original (not thumbnail) Wikipedia source for
sharpness, no blur on the image, lighter drop-shadow on the pill's
flag emoji.
The country detail page's hero already uses Wikipedia's page-summary
lead image (which is the flag for country articles) — mirror that
source in CountryFlagBackdrop instead of falling back to the giant
emoji as the primary asset.
useWikipediaSummary is gated by title, so non-country posts never
fetch, and TanStack Query's 24h staleTime / 7d gcTime means a feed of
N posts from the same country only pays the network cost once. The
emoji backdrop is still kept as a fallback while Wikipedia resolves or
when its response has no lead image.
Country-rooted kind-1111 cards now wear a giant blurred flag emoji
anchored upper-right, fading through hsl(var(--background)) before it
reaches the post body. Echoes the country detail hero's
'background + linear-gradient fade' technique, scaled down for a card.
The gating logic for the pill and the backdrop is factored into a
shared useCountryRootContext hook so they always appear or disappear
together. NoteCard's <article> picks up 'relative isolate' so the
absolute backdrop stays contained inside the card it belongs to.
Render each flag emoji to an offscreen canvas, sample the middle stripe,
bucket pixels by hue, and return the top three saturated colors ordered
by their left-to-right position. The country pill uses that palette as
its background gradient so Venezuelan posts get yellow/blue/red,
Brazilian ones get green/yellow, etc.
The work is memoised per-emoji and deferred via requestAnimationFrame.
While the palette is being extracted (or if canvas access fails in a
test/SSR environment), the pill falls back to the primary->accent
gradient. White text gets a drop shadow so it stays legible against
even the lightest flag palettes.
The disc was fighting the gradient surface. Let the flag sit directly
on the primary->accent gradient with a soft drop shadow for depth, tighten
gap, and even out the pill padding.
The two-line stack inside the pill was overkill — gradient surface,
flag disc, and country name already say it. Drop the uppercase tracker
and let the pill breathe.
The flat tinted chip didn't sell 'this is a country-level post'. Replace it
with a gradient pill (primary -> accent) carrying a white flag disc, a
'POSTED FROM' tracker label, and a soft primary-tinted shadow that
intensifies on hover. The country preview popover also picks up a matching
gradient accent bar.
Pill stays anchored to the upper right of NoteCard's header and hides
inside its own country feed, matching the previous visibility rules.
The old 'Commenting on \ud83c\uddfb\ud83c\uddea Venezuela' muted-text row visually
disappeared in the World feed. Swap it for a rounded primary-tinted
pill with a larger flag and the country name in semibold, keeping the
existing hover-card preview. Each country post now has a clear
neighborhood badge anchoring it in the feed without overwhelming
neighbouring cards.
P1546 (motto) is sparsely populated on Wikidata — Venezuela, the UK,
Germany, and many others have no claim even though their Wikipedia
infoboxes carry a motto. Pulling the missing values would require
parsing wikitext infobox templates, which vary per language and per
template version, so the cost outweighs the value of a one-liner.
Remove the field entirely (Wikidata SPARQL OPTIONAL, the CountryFacts
TypeScript field, and the below-hero render block) rather than leave
a tooltip-quality field that works for some countries and silently
omits for others.
Two stacked sub-bars under the hero felt chunky on tall mobile
viewports. Collapsed them into a single flex row: weather + capital on
the left, vitals (population / language / currency) right-aligned via
justify-between. The row wraps cleanly on narrow screens — vitals fall
under the weather group rather than getting crushed beside it.
Combined component (WeatherVitalsRow) renders nothing when both sides
are empty, so countries with no Wikidata facts and no weather still
collapse gracefully to hero + Wikipedia extract.
Wikidata's P37 (official language) is inclusive — it lists every legally
recognised language including signed ones, so Venezuela returns both
Spanish and Venezuelan Sign Language. For the destination header the
user is asking 'what do they speak?' Signed languages are accessibility
metadata, not a postcard answer. Add a FILTER NOT EXISTS on
P31/P279* wd:Q34228 in the SPARQL query so signed languages never reach
the client.
Also gate the px-4 space-y-6 pb-4 wrapper on non-country pages — it was
mounting empty (with bottom padding) on country pages, adding a dead
band between the top of the column and the start of the hero photo.
The country page now mounts the hero flush with the top of the column.
A circular back-arrow button overlaid on the top-left of the hero
photo (mirroring the top-right follow button's white-on-glass style)
replaces the back arrow that previously lived in the page header bar.
Same 'sidebar:hidden' rule the original header used — the back button
hides on wide layouts where the persistent left sidebar already
provides navigation.
URL / ISBN / unknown content types keep the original page header bar
because their content-specific headers don't include a back arrow.
The weather-station city duplicated a less-meaningful place name next
to the country capital and added visual noise (a literal '· Caracas'
next to 'Caracas'). The capital is the stable national place anchor;
the station city is whatever Open-Meteo nearest-match returned and is
rarely the city the user is thinking about.
Capital relocates from the vitals row up onto the weather line — it
reads more naturally next to the current weather-station city than next
to population / language / currency. A Landmark icon distinguishes the
two place names visually when both are present.
The motto moves out of the cramped hero overlay into its own borderless
line below the hero, where it has full column width to read as a proper
national epigraph rather than a 12-pixel afterthought truncated under a
flag.
The Stats pill button is removed from the page header. Stats now live
behind a 'View stats' item in the existing 3-dots menu on the action
bar, which is where users look for secondary actions on every other
page. CountryStatsDrawer is renamed to CountryStatsDialog and converted
to controlled-only (open / onOpenChange props) so the dropdown can drive
its open state without rendering a second visible trigger.
The Wikipedia extract loses its pt-3 — the divide-y border between the
preceding section and the extract was already providing visual
separation, and the extra padding made the extract feel disconnected
from the rest of the header.
Three bugs were stacking on top of each other to make the anthem button
silently do nothing:
1. **Double-encoded URL.** SPARQL returns Commons audio as
`Special:FilePath/<percent-encoded-filename>`. The commonsUrl()
helper re-encoded the already-encoded string, so spaces became %2520
and the resulting URL 404'd. Replaced with two helpers: commonsImageUrl
(decodes then re-encodes, returns https://) and commonsFilename
(decodes once to a plain filename) and routed the anthem through
the latter so we can hit MediaWiki API instead.
2. **OGG Vorbis doesn't play in Safari / iOS WKWebView.** Commons anthems
are almost always Ogg Vorbis; Apple browsers can't decode them. New
useCommonsAudio hook queries the MediaWiki videoinfo API to get the
full derivatives list (original OGG + server-side MP3 transcode) and
renders one <source> per format on the <audio> element. The button
sorts MP3 first so Safari picks the playable one, while Chrome/Firefox
are happy either way.
3. **play() called from a useEffect, not the click handler.** The old
AnthemButton lazy-mounted the audio element on first click via state,
then tried to call play() from an effect after the re-render. By that
point browsers had dropped the user-gesture token and silently
rejected the play promise. Now the <audio> is always mounted with
preload="none" (no bytes fetched upfront) and play() runs
synchronously inside the click handler.
Also added error handling: the play() promise rejection is now caught
and surfaced via toast, the <audio> onError fires a toast, and the
button doesn't render at all when no playable derivative exists, so
the user never sees a dead button.
The fast-facts grid was eight tiles of mixed cognitive weight (capital,
population, area, languages, currency, government, established, demonym).
Demonym, government, area, and inception read as encyclopedic rather than
destination-y, so the row collapses to four signals — Capital · Population
· Languages · Currency — inline with bullet separators instead of a grid.
Renders nothing if all four are missing, so sparsely-documented countries
don't get a half-empty row.
The weather widget loses feels-like, humidity, wind, and the day/night
indicator. The hero gradient and weather icon already signal time-of-day;
the rest belonged in a forecast widget, not a destination header.
Coat of arms moves out of its awkward 'flag-of-row + label' container and
sits inline next to the flag emoji in the hero title block, where it reads
as heraldic identity. Falls back to nothing on image error.
National anthem becomes a small circular play button next to the country
name in the hero — icon-only, with the anthem title in the tooltip. The
\"Play anthem\" placeholder label is gone; the country name is the label.
Result: most countries now render hero + one weather line + one vitals
line + Wikipedia extract. Optional flair (coat of arms, anthem, motto,
official native name) layers in only when Wikidata has it.
Replace the boxed CountryContentHeader with a cinematic edge-to-edge hero
backed by Wikipedia's high-res country photo. The image fades into the page
background via a multi-stop gradient that tints warm amber/rose during the
destination's daytime and deep indigo/violet at night (driven by the existing
weather.isDay signal). Flag, country name, official native name, and Wikidata
motto sit bottom-anchored over the photo with text-shadow for legibility; the
Follow button moves onto the hero in white-on-glass style.
A new useCountryFacts hook fetches richer Wikidata via a single SPARQL query:
capital, population, area, languages, currencies, government type, inception
date, demonym, anthem audio (Commons), coat of arms image (Commons), motto,
and official native names. The hook only runs for sovereign alpha-2 codes;
subdivisions like US-CA fall back to the existing flag/name/Wikipedia path.
Below the hero, the weather widget is reskinned as a borderless inline strip
and a new fast-facts grid surfaces the Wikidata fields without card chrome.
The optional coat of arms renders inline; the optional anthem mounts a lazy
<audio> element only after the user clicks Play, so multi-megabyte OGG files
from Commons aren't fetched for every page view.
The header is lifted out of ExternalContentPage's px-4 wrapper so its edges
bleed flush to the column rails — the 'you have arrived' feeling depends on
the photo touching the rails rather than floating in a padded box.
When a kind 1111 reply rooted to an iso3166 identifier is rendered inside
that same country's feed page, the 'Commenting on <country>' header is
redundant — the post is a top-level neighborhood entry, not a contextual
reply. CountryCommentContext now consults CountryFeedContext and renders
nothing when its identifier matches the surrounding country feed. The
header still appears everywhere else (profiles, notifications, search)
so users can see what a post is rooted to.
lemon