CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

Notable changes per release. Breaking changes and how to handle them are in MIGRATION.md; this file is the shorter view.

Versions follow semver: a major changes something you can observe, a minor adds, a patch fixes.

6.0.4

Fixed

• Dark mode painted card and modal headers the wrong colour. Both were a hardcoded #1a237e — the light theme's navy, left behind when the dark palette moved on — so a card header was the one piece of chrome that did not follow the accent: light blue title bars on the sidebar and over code blocks, a stray navy one on every card and dialog. Both now read --retro-primary and --retro-primary-fg, which also means a site that re-themes the accent re-themes its headers.
• Every heading was bold at nearly the same size. h5 and h6 were identical (16px, bold), so the last two levels of an outline were indistinguishable, and h2 carried the same panel-and-accent-bar treatment as h1 — which made every section start with a second title bar and a page of sections read as a stack of slabs. The scale steps 30 / 24 / 20 / 18 / 16 / 14 now, h2 is ruled off with the framework's bevelled hairline instead of boxed, and h6 is small caps. The same corrections apply to .retro-h1 … .retro-h6.

Site

• The home page's hero topped out at 44px, shouting over section titles of 20px. It tops out one step above the framework's h1 now.

6.0.3

Fixed

• A closed dropdown menu could widen the page. visibility: hidden hides a box but keeps it, and an absolutely positioned box still counts toward the document's scrollable overflow — so a menu as wide as its longest item pushed the document 35px past a 420px viewport, in RTL where it opens toward the other edge, for a menu nobody could see. A closed menu now collapses to nothing, and an open one is capped at the viewport.

Site

• Every page on the site now carries the same chrome. The ten pages had three different navs — the home page and the docs had an Examples dropdown inside a centred shell, the seven examples had a flat link inside a full-bleed container, and the RTL page had four Arabic links inside its 900px content wrapper — and five different footer positions, from 322..1344 to a full-bleed 0..1400. Nav, rule and footer are now one block at one width on all ten pages: 56..1344 at a 1400px viewport, against a 40..1360 shell.
• .example-footer is drawn like .site-footer — same rule, same rhythm — so the examples stop looking like a different site from the one linking to them.
• Fixed an unclosed .retro-main-layout on the home page, which had swallowed the footer into the content column.

6.0.2

Fixed

• The current row in a sidebar nav lost its fill but kept its on-fill text colour, so a page marked with aria-current (or .active) rendered white text on the light panel at 1.14:1. 6.0.1 gave sidebar rows a transparent background at a specificity that outranked .retro-nav-item's own state rules; the state is now restored at the same specificity. Caught by a consumer's contrast gate, not by this repo's: the demo pages set aria-current from a scroll observer, so nothing carries it at load.

6.0.1

Fixed

• The sidebar panel stretched to the full viewport (height: calc(100vh - 32px)), so a short contents list sat at the top of a tall empty box and a long one scrolled inside a panel that gave no sign it could. It is content-height now, capped at the viewport, and only scrolls when it would otherwise leave the screen.
• A panel that does scroll draws a Win9x scrollbar — square track, bevelled thumb, both from tokens — instead of the platform's thin modern overlay bar, which read as a piece of another operating system stapled inside a 1995 window.
• A nav or a list inside the sidebar drew its own frame inside the panel's frame inside the column: three borders saying the same thing. The panel is the frame; its contents are separated by hairlines and by group bands bled to its edges.
• Sidebar rows were set at body size with the full nav padding, so a forty-link contents ran 1500px. They are list rows now.
• The title bar stays pinned while the panel scrolls, as a window's does.

Site

• The home page, the documentation and all eight examples share one site.css. They had a copy each of the same page CSS, which had drifted: the home page ran full-bleed while the docs were centred at 1320px, the heroes used different type scales, the footer was duplicated seven times and the whole sign-in layout twice. Every page now uses the same shell — --retro-container-xxl — and carries no inline style block at all.

6.0.0

Three things you can see, which is what makes this a major.

Changed

• --retro-danger is #cc0000, and its on-fill text is white. The fill was pure #ff0000, where white scores 4.00:1 and black 5.25:1 — so every danger button, badge, alert and toast carried black text. That passed the arithmetic and read like a label printed on a fire extinguisher. On #cc0000 white scores 5.89:1. The hover and active states move with it. To keep the old pair: :root { --retro-danger: #ff0000; --retro-danger-fg: #000; }
• The progress label carries a plate. It straddles the filled bar and the empty track, which are always opposite in lightness, and a text-shadow halo was not enough: over the striped navy bar the glyphs and their fringe simply mixed. The label now sits on a small bordered plate in the track colour, so it is read against one known surface whatever is underneath it.
• The sidebar is a panel, not a flat box. It gets the framework's raised chassis, its header is a title bar painted like the one over a code block, a band that introduces a list is now the top of that list's box, and lists in a sidebar are framed like the navs beside them. One rhythm spaces the widgets, so a column of them stops reading as a pile of unrelated cards.

Added

• [aria-current] lights a .retro-nav-item the way .active does. Marking the current page the accessible way should not cost you the highlight.

Documentation

• A trademark notice. RetroCSS imitates the look of mid-1990s desktop software; it is independent, unaffiliated and unendorsed, and ships no Microsoft artwork, icon, font or code. Product-facing copy says Win9x or mid-90s desktop; the prose that explains how Windows itself behaved still names it, because that is what the sentences are about.

5.0.0

Fixed

• Sortable table headers rendered a control character followed by 95 instead of a ↕ arrow. Three escapes in _table.scss had been mangled into raw control bytes, and it shipped for the whole 4.0 line. check:css now fails on any control byte in the SCSS sources.
• RetroCSS.init() re-registered roughly 250 listeners on every call — 66 blur, 46 keydown, 44 click, 29 focus, 28 mouseenter, 28 mouseleave — on elements that were already wired. It is documented as the entry point for re-initialising after a DOM change, so an app calling it per route accumulated them. A repeat init() now registers zero.
• Every [data-retro-toast] trigger fired one toast per init() call, so a page initialised three times showed three toasts on one click.
• Nested dialogs restored focus to the wrong element: a single _lastFocused slot could not describe a dialog opened from a dialog. It is a stack now.
• Dismiss controls (.retro-alert-close, .retro-toast-close) rendered 22×20 and now meet the 24px target WCAG 2.5.8 asks for.
• Buttons placed directly in a .retro-form stretched the full width of the form, because the form is a flex column. They sit at their natural width; .retro-w-full still wins.

Changed (breaking)

• RetroCarousel and RetroAccordion are objects with init(), matching every other module. new RetroCarousel(el) and new RetroAccordion(sel) no longer work; RetroCarousel.init() is how the demos and documentation always called them. See MIGRATION.
• sassdoc and the docs:api script are gone. It was unmaintained since 2022, its output was never published, and it accounted for all 11 advisories in the dependency tree. The /// comments stay in the source. The tree now reports zero vulnerabilities.

Infrastructure

• package-lock.json is committed and CI uses npm ci, so builds are reproducible and dependency drift is visible.
• The publish workflow runs the unit tests and all four gates before publishing. Previously a tag built and published without any gate seeing the commit.
• 36 unit tests, up from 16: modal focus management (trap, inert, restore, nesting), init() idempotence, dropdown keyboard navigation, and table sorting including the numeric sniff and data-sort="none".

4.0.0

Packaged for bundlers: ESM, CJS and TypeScript definitions behind an exports map, safe to import during server-side rendering. Added right-to-left support via logical properties — the Win9x bevels deliberately do not mirror. Fixed a white modal scrim in dark mode, accordions double-binding on every dynamically added accordion, and ~70 lines of dead mobile-drawer CSS.

3.1.1

Removed the theme flash. The dark palette ships under prefers-color-scheme as well as [data-theme], so a dark-OS visitor is painted dark on the first frame rather than after the bundle parses.

3.1.0

Made every control the JavaScript drives keyboard-operable: rating stars became a radiogroup, carousel dots became buttons, tooltips appear on focus, tag removes became buttons, tabs gained a roving tabindex. Completed the --retro-border-radius token so one declaration rounds the whole framework. Dark mode began following the operating system.

3.0.1

Returned the framework to square. Dropping the !important from the radius reset in 3.0.0 woke 31 dormant declarations and rounded eleven components, including 999px nav pills.

3.0.0

Body text to 16px, and border-radius: 0 is no longer !important — both visible on every page, each with a one-line override.

2.8.1

Repaired the shipped bundle. window.RetroCSS was the ESM namespace rather than the object, so every documented RetroCSS.* call was a TypeError. Stopped the search bar overwriting the host page's own markup.

2.5.0 – 2.8.0

The Win9x grey-chassis dark theme and a retuned text ramp; SEO metadata, structured data and one h1 per page; badges stopped shouting; the input glyph was centred on its field; example pages stopped fighting the framework with their own CSS.

2.0.0

The readability pass: a four-tier colour token system, and WCAG AA across both themes with a CI gate asserting it.