check-embedded-rtl opens with "TWO DEFECTS", in the present tense, describing
library/i18n/index.js reflecting RTL at construction time and writing
document.documentElement.dir unconditionally. Both were fixed. The header was
not.
It cost a real wrong answer today: I read it as a description of current code
and reported a live library defect on that basis, when main already guards the
documentElement write behind window.MAP_OWNS_PAGE === true, and the plugin's own
direction has moved to ProfileLoader, which computes dirAttr from effectiveLocale
and binds it on .profile-loader. effectiveLocale falls back through lang.value,
which is the profile-config channel -- the very path the header says never
arrives.
So the section is now marked as history, dated, and written in the past tense,
with a pointer to the two places to look before believing either defect is live
again. What the check asserts is unchanged and stated plainly at the end: the
plugin's own root carries direction, the partner's page must not, which is why
it reads .profile-loader inside the shadow root and records partnerHtmlDir
separately.
The trap is worth naming in the file rather than only in a commit message,
because the next reader is likely to be someone interpreting a FAILURE of this
gate, which is the worst moment to be handed a stale account of the code. A
gate's header is evidence of what was true when it was written.
Comment-only: 33 insertions, 9 deletions, no executable line touched.
Only the browser seat runs browsers, and only inside internal/browser-slot.sh.
That rule was remembered, not enforced: an agent ran a gate it took for a
headless source check and it launched Chromium outside the slot.
internal/lib/playwright-guarded.mjs is now the one way a repo file reaches
playwright: its launch(), launchPersistentContext(), launchServer(), connect()
and connectOverCDP() exit 75 (NOT MEASURED) with a message naming
browser-slot.sh unless DOXA_BROWSER_SLOT is set, and browser-slot.sh exports it
for the command it runs, so a bash -c grandchild inherits it. All 72 files that
imported playwright switch to it (internal/lib/browser.mjs and 64 internal gates;
plugin-designs scripts: doxa-research-map 3, my-upg-100-list 2,
research-map-plus-grid 2, research-dashboard 1): a mechanical import swap.
check:browser-gates-guarded (gates:pre) fails a direct import;
bun run browser-gates lists the 97 scripts that launch a browser. isBrowserGate
moves to internal/lib/browser-gates.mjs so the runner and the check share it.
Under the Playwright policy only rega runs a browser here, so this
check's result has to come from someone else's eyes. But the partner
page only ever existed INSIDE check-embedded-rtl — two createServer calls
on ephemeral ports — so "open a partner page at a foreign origin" was not
a thing anyone but the gate could do. NEEDS-EYES rows 3, 4 and 6 name a
runnable probe or an exact URL; row 7 was mine, and it named a construct
that lived in my own process.
--emit writes the same pages to disk, with the two-terminal recipe and
what to look at, so the item is reproducible by whoever has the browser.
⚠ THEY GO IN documentation/, NOT _qa-cycle/. I wrote them there first and
then checked: _qa-cycle is gitignored (.gitignore:113), so the files
could never have travelled to the person who needs them — which is the
entire point. documentation/ is tracked and already carries
README-embed-example.md.
⚠ AND THE ?lang=ar FIXTURE CARRIES NO locale IN ITS profile-config —
1100 bytes against 1114. The two channels reach the document-direction
code by different routes and detectLocale() reads the URL FIRST, so a
config that also supplied the locale would let a reviewer believe the URL
had done it when it had not. The first emit produced all three files
BYTE-IDENTICAL, which would have handed someone three pages they could
not tell apart; I only caught it by checking the emitted sizes rather
than trusting that the flag had taken effect.
The CASES array now carries the ?lang= row itself, so this stands alone:
the emit produces every fixture committed beside it. It previously
depended on the library/ commit for that row, which left the repo with a
fixture the tool would not regenerate — worse than either half.
Also: --emit was being consumed as the baseUrl positional ("SKIP —
nothing served at --emit"). Flags are filtered out of it now. That is the
same bug, in the same shape, that check-leaf-english-leaks had three days
ago — worth knowing it recurs in any gate that takes both a positional
and flags.
The output tree's name has always been configurable (vite.doxa-maps-build-config.json "name"),
but 61 tooling files ignored it and hardcoded 'doxa-maps' (181 literals), so a rename would have
moved the build while the gates kept reading the old folder.
- internal/_tree-name.mjs reads it once (validated as one URL-safe path segment; falls back to the
historical name) and exports TREE_NAME / TREE_NAME_RE; `node internal/_tree-name.mjs` prints it
for shell scripts.
- A codemod rewrote 171 literals in internal/ to TREE_NAME; the regex literals, messages with
backticks, atomic-public-swap.sh (fails loudly if the name cannot be read), build-lock.sh and
vite.config.js (its duplicate readMfeName is gone) were done by hand.
- The name is unchanged: old and new tooling produce all 1408 files under public/ byte for byte.
Code lines still naming the tree in internal/ + vite.config.js: 2, both intended (the helper's
fallback, the private-repo-name pattern in public-hygiene-check).
This renames nothing visible; the eventual rename becomes a one-line config change.
Arabic text was rendering inside a left-to-right layout: readable glyphs
in the wrong place, which reads as a styling quirk rather than the bug
it is.
TWO DEFECTS IN ONE BLOCK (library/i18n/index.js, createAppI18n):
TARGET — it wrote document.documentElement.dir. An EMBEDDED widget
doing that flips the PARTNER'S WHOLE PAGE: their headings, their nav,
their footer. The existing comment already worried about the host
owning that decision, but guarded only against CLEARING dir, never
against setting it.
TIMING — it ran at createAppI18n() construction, reading
detectLocale(), which sees only the URL and <html lang>. A locale
arriving later through profile-config — the channel a HOST uses —
never reached it. Measured across the previous landing: htmlDir null
on every host-channel run, including leaves whose chrome was fully
Arabic.
Direction now binds on ProfileLoader's own root, driven by
effectiveLocale — the locale actually in force AFTER profile-config, so
it re-evaluates when a host changes the language. This element cannot
tell "I am the page" from "I am a widget", and guessing wrong is exactly
the failure above, so it no longer touches the document at all.
MEASURED on a partner page at a FOREIGN ORIGIN with
profile-config.locale='ar' (same gate, before and after):
before upg-100-mfe plugin root ltr, arabic 1765 FAIL
poster-wall plugin root ltr, arabic 1738 FAIL
after upg-100-mfe plugin root RTL, arabic 1765 pass
poster-wall plugin root RTL, arabic 1738 pass
partner <html>/<body>/<h1> stayed ltr throughout.
Standalone leaves are unchanged and still get <html dir="rtl"> from
?lang=ar — verified, both profiles — because a leaf page DOES own its
document. createAppI18n's document write therefore stays for now;
replacing it needs a page-ownership signal that touches every generated
leaf, which is its own change rather than a rider on this one.
⚠ THE GATE REFUSES TO JUDGE WHAT IT CANNOT SEE, and that guard earned
its place twice before this was measurable. Its first two runs reported
"the element never mounted" — a HARNESS gap, not the product: a partner
embed uses crossorigin="anonymous" (SRI requires it), so the tree must
send Access-Control-Allow-Origin, which `bun run serve` does not. The
gate now proxies the tree through its own CORS-enabled port. Without
that guard those runs would have read as fails-first evidence for a
defect nothing had actually exercised. It also fails if the locale
produced zero Arabic chrome, because direction cannot be assessed on a
page whose language never applied.
