- D1's
variant is no longer a branch: no stylesheet styles it; - D5's
steps needs SPEC-156's ladder for its numbering; - D4's
SPEC-146 gate has lifted; - D7 depends on SPEC-145 D30;
- each composition states its chrome defaults with D34;
- the Order changes as a result.
Measurements
Both were run against main after v0.41.0's changes, with a throwaway composed definition loaded through the same harness as the storytelling compositions (packages/content/test/composed-storytelling.ts). Neither probe was committed.
A composition can already publish a rating
A composed quote-card declared rating and rating-total attributes, a metaFields entry { metaType: rating, rating: { total: rating-total }, condition: rating }, a blocks entry placing it, and placed it with {% metablock name="stars" /%} inside {% section %}. It rendered the engine's shared rating widget: <span data-meta-type="rating"> with four marks data-filled="true" and one false for rating=4. With no rating, the block was omitted.
The same definition declared testimonial's schema table in frontmatter, with its two nested entities: an author Person (author → name, role → jobTitle) and a rating Rating (rating → ratingValue). The JSON-LD came out as { "@type": "Review", "reviewBody": …, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Ada" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": 4 } }, identical at both harvest points: the pre-engine harvest site.ts publishes, and after the identity transform.
So a rating needs no new primitive. The metadata machinery a composition already has (SPEC-145 D7, WORK-630's metablock) renders it, and the schema table publishes it.
deflist cannot take definition's split as it stands
deflist reads one shape: a list item whose first inline is **Term:**, with a colon (packages/runes/src/tags/deflist.ts, extractTermPrefix). A probe rendered three feature-style items through it:
| Item | Result |
|---|
- **Fast** then an indented description paragraph | empty <dt>, everything in <dd>, a build warning |
- **Typed:** Every rune is checked. | <dt>Typed</dt><dd>Every rune is checked.</dd> |
- {% icon %} **Light** then two description paragraphs | empty <dt>, everything in <dd>, a build warning |
feature's definition reads all three. Its term is any leading heading, or paragraph holding an image, an {% icon %} or **strong** text; its description is every paragraph after the first plain one (plugins/marketing/src/tags/feature.ts, isTermParagraph). And deflist renders the definition-list zone layout, a label/value table, where feature renders a grid of items.
Decisions
D1 — testimonial composes once section has a portrait zone, with its author as attributes
Amended by SPEC-182 D6–D7. The byline stays text: a paragraph field takes an item model and fills the rune's author and role, which remain as the alternative form. "What authors give up" below no longer holds, and the paragraph form is not reported as content-unmatched.
Built from: section with a split and media="portrait" (SPEC-160 D2), the rating metablock, and a byline metablock in the lead layout (D6).
Its only missing prerequisite is SPEC-160 D2. Measured part by part:
| Part | Built from | Today |
|---|
| The quote | a blockquote placed through a slot | available |
| Stars | the rating field shape and {% metablock %} | available, measured |
Review / Person / Rating | a frontmatter schema table, author from attributes | available, measured at both harvest points |
| Author name and role | metaFields from attributes, in a byline block | available as bar; the stacked look needs D6 |
variant | a declared attribute, emitted as data-variant on the root; no branch | available |
| The surface and compact spacing | defaults: { elevation: flat, density: compact } (SPEC-145 D34) | density needs D34's extension (SPEC-145 D33, D34) |
| Round avatar | a media zone marked data-media="portrait" | missing: section has no media zone until WORK-652 (v0.43.0) |
lead (D6) is what makes the byline look as it does today, name emphasised and role beneath; without it the byline renders in a bar, which is correct but reads as one line. pull-quote's attribution (D2) is not on this path.
---
tag: article
attributes:
author: { type: string, description: "The person quoted." }
role: { type: string, description: "Their role or organisation." }
rating: { type: number, description: "Rating out of rating-total." }
rating-total: { type: number, default: 5 }
variant: { type: string, matches: [card, inline, quote], default: card }
content:
type: sequence
fields:
avatar: { match: image, optional: true }
quote: { match: blockquote }
avatar-after: { match: image, optional: true }
metaFields:
rating: { metaType: rating, rating: { total: rating-total }, condition: rating }
author: { tag: cite, condition: author }
role: { condition: role }
blocks:
rating: { fields: [rating], layout: bar }
byline: { fields: [author, role], layout: lead }
schema:
type: Review
properties: { quote: reviewBody }
entities:
author: { type: Person, property: author, properties: { author: name, role: jobTitle } }
rating: { type: Rating, property: reviewRating, properties: { rating: ratingValue } }
defaults:
elevation: flat
density: compact
---
{% section media-position="start" media="portrait" %}
{% slot name="avatar" /%}
{% slot name="avatar-after" /%}
---
{% metablock name="rating" /%}
{% slot name="quote" /%}
{% metablock name="byline" /%}
{% /section %}
The two image fields are because the plugin accepts the avatar before or after the quote; both are placed in the media zone, and an empty one renders nothing. rating becomes marks with metaType: rating when WORK-639 lands.
The author moves from content to attributes. Today the name is the **strong** text of the first paragraph and the role is what follows a dash (testimonial.ts:81-101), which is why SPEC-151 found testimonial gated on SPEC-146: a value read from content placed inside a primitive is not reachable by the schema harvest. As attributes they ride the field bag, and the measurement above shows them publishing. This also fixes a loss the plugin has today: only string children of the name and role survive, so a linked company name loses its link.
What authors give up: the **Ada Lovelace** — Analyst paragraph. The sketch above has no catch-all field, so on a page written that way the paragraph matches nothing and content-unmatched reports it, at error severity since WORK-638. That keeps the migration loud, and it must stay so: adding a body field would quietly render the paragraph and publish no author. The fix is a codemod, since the plugin's own parser already knows the shape and can rewrite the paragraph into author and role attributes once.
variant is not a branch. An earlier draft placed {% card %} for variant="card" and {% section %} otherwise, with {% if %} around the whole invocation. That had two problems:
- The default lost its avatar. WORK-652 gives
media="portrait" to section only, so the card branch, which is the default, could not draw a round portrait. - There is nothing to branch on.
variant emits rf-testimonial--card, --inline and --quote, and no stylesheet in the repository styles any of them: not Lumina, not skeleton, not the plugin. The surface every testimonial draws comes from defaultElevation: 'flat', and elevation="flat" on any rune draws a complete surface: fill, border, radius and padding (surfaces.css).
So the composition places one section, gets its surface from D34's elevation: flat default, and keeps variant as a declared attribute that the root emits as data-variant. A theme that keyed on the old classes can key on that. An author who wants the borderless look writes elevation="flush". Whether variant is retired outright is SPEC-159's materiality question, and nothing here depends on it.
D2 — pull-quote gains an attribution
pull-quote takes a blockquote and has no attribution. HTML's pattern for a quote with a source is <figure><blockquote/><figcaption/></figure>. pull-quote gains an optional figcaption part, filled from a trailing paragraph inside the rune (or a cite attribute), and renders as a figure when it has one. Without one, its output is unchanged.
This is no longer on testimonial's path. An earlier draft had testimonial place its author through pull-quote. The byline metablock (D1, D6) does that job with machinery compositions already have, and keeps the author as structured fields the schema table reads. The attribution stays worth doing for quotes in general: a pull-quote in an article that names its source.
Open question: whether the attribution should be cite (an attribute, structured) or a trailing paragraph (content, free-form). An attribute is the default because it is reachable; the paragraph form can be added if authors ask for inline links in it.
D3 — feature needs deflist to learn the feature term, not a new content-model form
SPEC-151 recorded feature as needing "definition's split model" and linked it to SPEC-147's proposed segmented content model. The measurement above narrows it: the split is a primitive's job, not the composition's. A core primitive may own imperative code; only a composition must be declarative. So:
deflist gains definition's term shapes: a leading heading, or a paragraph holding an image, an icon or a bold lead with no colon, as the term; every following block as the description. The **Term:** form keeps working, and an item that matches no shape keeps today's empty-<dt> fallback and warning.- The arrangement (grid, list, carousel) is not
deflist's. It comes from SPEC-156's row and ladder arrangements, placed around it. Noted 2026-10-28: a feature list is usually a grid, and SPEC-156 D1 leaves grid to its own spec, so feature waits for that spec as well as for deflist's terms. feature is then section with a split (media-position defaulting to bottom, as today), its header, and the arranged deflist over a definitions slot. Its chrome is hero's: defaults: { width: full, elevation: flush } (SPEC-145 D34) and guest-fit="bleed" on the section (SPEC-160 D7). Today's native feature drops a second leading heading (BUG-047), and composing it fixes that.
This does not replace the segmented model. plot and storyboard still need a content model that splits on a boundary predicate, because their panels are the rune's own structure. It removes feature from that model's critical path.
Open question: whether deflist is the right home, given that its default rendering is a label/value table. The alternative is a separate items primitive sharing deflist's term detection. The deciding question is whether a feature list is a definition list in the HTML sense (term and description), which it is, so deflist with an arrangement is the default.
D4 — tier is a legitimate card; pricing waits on authored prices
A pricing tier is a discrete object, so tier composes over card, not section: the one marketing rune where ADR-041's rule points the other way, and the reason card stays.
- Featured is emphasis on the card, replacing the
featured-tier rune name. It is the universal featured intent (SPEC-167 D2), not elevation or a prominence value. - The sign-up link becomes
actions (SPEC-160 D6). Today url is harvested from the first <a> in the tier body. - The feature list stays a plain list, styled as a checklist by Lumina as it is now.
- The price is the blocker, as SPEC-151 D2 recorded:
parsedPrice and resolvedCurrency are computed from the authored string. The fix is to make them authored: price="19" currency="USD" period="month", published directly as price and priceCurrency, and displayed with core's {% amount %} (SPEC-162 D7; this replaces the separate {% price %} rune first proposed here). Formatting at render is presentation, not derived data, because the schema reads the attributes. This also fixes a defect in the plugin: inferCurrency matches currency symbols only as a prefix, so 29 kr publishes USD.
pricing itself is a section header and an arranged list of tiers. Its Product name and description come from the headline and blurb, which is SPEC-151 D3's pageSectionProperties case. That was gated on SPEC-146 Problem 2, which shipped in v0.39.0 (WORK-610), so the gate has lifted. tier defaults to elevation: flat, density: compact (SPEC-145 D34), as the native tier and featured-tier do.
What authors give up: the ## Pro — $19 heading shorthand, which the plugin parses into a tier. It cannot be expressed declaratively, and keeping it means keeping the plugin rune. That regression is the main reason pricing is last.
D5 — steps composes once the ladder exists
steps is a section with a numbered sequence of steps, and step is a section with a split. It has no schema table (only the Step typeof).
An earlier draft called it the cheapest marketing composition, with nothing new needed. That was wrong on one point: numbering. The native steps numbers its items through sequence: 'numbered' in its config. A composition's generated config has no sequence, and SPEC-169 D6 sends sequence to SPEC-156's ladder, {% group layout="ladder" %}, which SPEC-169 D4's own steps example places. No group primitive or ladder arrangement exists yet, and SPEC-156 is a draft.
The rest is in place:
each over a list's items shipped in v0.42.0 (WORK-648), so the conditional content model is not needed (SPEC-169 D4);- a step written as a list item with no heading renders as body (ADR-046);
- the chrome is
defaults: { elevation: flush } (SPEC-145 D34). section already resolves to full density, as steps does.
So steps follows SPEC-156, not SPEC-160.
D6 — a lead layout for blocks: a lead value with secondary values beneath
A blocks entry renders its fields through a layout primitive, and there are two (LayoutPrimitive = 'definition-list' | 'bar', packages/transform/src/types.ts): bar, a row, and definition-list, a label/value grid. Neither draws a byline, the shape two runes already hand-roll in their own CSS:
testimonial.css: __author-name bold, __author-role small and muted, 0.125rem below it;cast.css: __name semibold, __role small and muted, 0.125rem below it.
Named lead, not stack (renamed 2026-10-27). SPEC-156 D11 keeps stack unnamed, because a column with nothing else to say is ordinary block flow, and naming it invites stack-tight and stack-loose. This layout is named for the one thing that sets it apart from flow: a lead value.
lead is a third layout: the block's fields in a column, the first marked data-lead. The skin emphasises the lead and makes the rest secondary (smaller, muted). Its contract is statable without naming a rune ("a primary value with secondary values beneath it"), and it fits more than people: a title over a date, a product over a price.
"Secondary" here is visual, never data-meta-rank. [data-density="compact"] [data-meta-rank="secondary"] hides an element, and a composed testimonial is compact (D1). If lead marked its non-lead values with that rank, every compact byline would lose the role. Today no code emits data-meta-rank (BUG-023), so nothing is hidden. The lead is marked with data-lead, and the skin styles the rest by :not([data-lead]), so a fix for BUG-023 cannot reach the byline. Checked on 2026-10-26.
The engine change is one layout branch beside bar; the CSS is a few lines in skeleton/styles/dimensions/metadata.css and Lumina's. testimonial's author rules and cast's name and role rules are deleted when those runes compose.
Open question, to come back to: a {% lead %} rune for authored content. bar and deflist ship twice, as a layout the engine fills from declared fields and as a rune that renders the same structure over author-written markdown (SPEC-145 D7). lead could follow suit: each top-level paragraph is an item, the first is the lead, and the output is the same data-zone-layout="lead" element with data-lead, so one set of CSS styles both.
{% lead %}
**Ada Lovelace**
Analyst, Babbage & Co
{% /lead %}
Inline markup would survive (links, bold, an icon), which the field-fed block cannot carry. Uses: an author box under a post, an attribution under a quote in prose, a title over a detail in a grid of cards. It would carry no meaning: no <cite>, no structured data, and no splitting of a single **Name** — Role line, which is the imperative parsing that gated testimonial in the first place. A quote's semantic source belongs to pull-quote's attribution (D2), and a typed author to the field-fed block.
Nothing audited here depends on it, so it is not part of this decision. It is cheap, modelled on packages/runes/src/tags/bar.ts with no new CSS. Revisit it when an author asks for a byline outside a composition, or fold it into the layout's change if it costs as little as expected.
cast-member could use the D6 byline too, and nothing blocks that. But in a team grid the member is the subject of their own region, so their name is that region's heading, which is what section's header already models:
{% section media-position="top" media="portrait" prominence="quiet" %}
{% slot name="portrait" /%}
---
# {% $attrs.name %}
{% $attrs.role %}
{% slot name="body" /%}
{% /section %}
The name becomes the headline and the role the blurb, emphasised and muted by the header styles that exist, and prominence="quiet" scales it for a grid. The composed character already writes its heading as # {% $attrs.name %}. Person maps name and role from attributes, as SPEC-149 found. The portrait is SPEC-160 D2's, and an image attribute rendered there still needs SPEC-149 D4's scheme resolution.
This depends on SPEC-145 D30. With no role, the paragraph after the headline is the first paragraph of body, so section's grammar reads it as the blurb, and ADR-046's slot-role warning fires. The template must guard the role with {% if $attrs.role %}. Until D30 resolves an expansion-bound conditional during expansion, the if stays a tag, and section does not see the paragraph inside it (SPEC-145 D17). So the role would never be a blurb. cast-member waits on D30.
In testimonial the subject is the quote and the person is its source, so a heading would be wrong there; that is the byline's case. If the two should look identical regardless, cast-member can use the byline instead; the choice is presentational.
What is new, and what it unlocks
| Capability | Kind | Unlocks |
|---|
| Rating | none needed: metaFields + metablock | testimonial; any rated thing |
pull-quote attribution (D2) | extends a core rune | any attributed quote |
lead block layout (D6) | a third layout primitive | the testimonial byline; any lead-over-secondary pair |
section portrait zone | SPEC-160 D2 | testimonial, cast-member, character |
deflist feature terms (D3) | extends a core rune | feature |
actions | SPEC-160 D6 | hero, cta, tier |
Authored price + {% amount %} (D4) | core rune from SPEC-162 | tier, pricing |
segmented content model | SPEC-147 | plot, storyboard (no longer feature) |
| Ladder arrangement | SPEC-156 | steps (its numbering), feature |
Chrome defaults, density included | SPEC-145 D34 | every composition here |
| Expansion-bound conditionals | SPEC-145 D30 | cast-member |
Order
testimonial (D1, D6): needs SPEC-160 D2 (WORK-652, v0.43.0), lead, the codemod, and density in SPEC-145 D34.steps (D5): needs SPEC-156's ladder.feature (D3): needs deflist's terms and SPEC-156's arrangements.pricing and tier (D4): needs actions (v0.43.0), amount (SPEC-162) and featured (SPEC-167).cast-member (D7): needs SPEC-145 D30, and can go whenever D30 is built.
Each composition is compared with the plugin's output before it replaces anything, as SPEC-147 D2 set: JSON-LD against the SEO baseline, rendered HTML, and every difference explained. The plugin runes stay until that comparison is reviewed.
Acceptance Criteria
testimonial exists as a composition whose JSON-LD matches the plugin's Review graph (reviewBody, Person author, Rating) with the author given as attributes- The composed
testimonial places one section with no {% if %}, draws its surface from defaults: { elevation: flat, density: compact }, keeps the round avatar for every variant, and emits variant as data-variant on its root - A codemod rewrites
**Name** — Role testimonial paragraphs into author / role attributes, and is run over this repo's content pull-quote renders an attribution as figcaption inside a figure, and is unchanged without oneblocks accept a lead layout with the first field marked data-lead; testimonial's byline renders through it and the hand-rolled author and cast name/role CSS is deletedcast-member composes over section with its name as the header and its role as the blurb, publishing the plugin's Person graphdeflist reads definition's term shapes, keeps the **Term:** form, and feature composes over it with matching outputtier composes over card with authored price / currency, publishes Offer price and priceCurrency, and 29 kr publishes SEK (or the stated currency)steps exists as a composition matching the plugin's output, numbered by SPEC-156's ladder rather than a sequence config field- SPEC-151's open question on
testimonial's author sources is closed with a pointer to this spec
References
- ADR-041 and SPEC-160: section as the base,
actions. - SPEC-151: the marketing audit this re-reads.
- SPEC-146: reachability, which
pricing's header still waits on. - SPEC-147: the
segmented model, and the comparison discipline. - SPEC-156: the arrangements
feature and pricing place their items in. - SPEC-159:
materiality, which decides whether testimonial's variant is retired. - SPEC-145: D30 (
cast-member), D31–D34 (carrier, placement, defaults).