Motion

What moves

Smooth scrolling, the scroll-driven card deck and recommendations fan, the dialog’s flip, per-letter rolls on nav links, and fade-ins on scroll.

Motion on this site is doing one of two jobs: showing that two things are the same object in different places, or pacing a sequence so one idea lands before the next. Motion that is only decorative should not survive review.

Reduced motion is a hard stop, not a dimmer

When someone asks for reduced motion, the decks stop being decks. The pinned stage releases, cards become a plain vertical list, the fan becomes a stack, the dialog stops flipping and smooth scrolling is off.

This has to be checked, not assumed. The reduced-motion block was in place for months while missing two selectors that outranked it, and the result was severe: all twelve recommendation cards landed in the same absolute position, so eleven were invisible, behind roughly five screens of empty scroll track.

The cause was specificity. A media query adds none, so a two-class rule elsewhere beat the single-class reset inside the block.

Things that must stay still

Anything auto-playing over five seconds needs a way to pause, for everyone, not only people who set the reduced-motion flag. The animated logo rings are the open question on this site: they loop indefinitely and are decorative, and the honest answer is they should be marked decorative and treated as background.

Checks before you ship

1. Turn on reduced motion in the operating system. Every deck is a list and every item is visible.
2. Compute, do not eyeball: no element in a reduced-motion list shares a position with another.
3. Nothing new loops forever without a way to stop it.