0.10.0 — the instance mark in the header

The instance monogram had existed for a long time — as the icon on a phone's home screen, as the favicon in a browser tab, as an avatar on platforms. On the site itself it appeared nowhere. The header showed the name alone, and across a dozen releases nobody thought to check, because the mark was visible everywhere around the page and only not on it.

You cannot simply take the PWA icon and paste it into the header. That icon has a paper ground, because it lands on a phone's home screen and must stand on anything at all — a wallpaper, a photograph, a system colour. In the header the ground is already paper, and such a square reads as a patch. It matches in one theme only, and only until somebody touches the colour.

The header mark is therefore drawn by a separate tool: the same monogram and the same rule, but with no ground and no margin, cropped to the extent of its ink. The crop is not decoration — a file carrying its own invisible margin would stand differently from its neighbours in a row, which is exactly how the feed and profile icons stood through the three previous releases.

The mark sits inside the same link as the name, not beside it. This is one way into the home page and should be one target; two adjacent links to the same place are an extra stop for a screen reader and nothing besides. For the same reason the image carries no alternative text — the name stands right next to it, and reading it twice is not a service.

The field is optional, like every field of its kind: an instance without a mark shows the name alone and lacks nothing. The release number moves to 0.10.0 rather than 0.9.10 — the 0.9 line was entirely about the feed, the icons and their alignment, and it is tidier to close it than to drag it into two-digit endings.