The archive's page now starts left of the masthead above it

[davidvornholt]

Postlude's signed-in pages sit in a column of a fixed maximum width, centred in the window. Until recently the app's frame set that width once, around every page. PR #15 moved the decision down to each page so the archive could be wider than a page of prose — a year grid of days needs the room.

The frame's header did not move with it. The masthead — the "Postlude" wordmark, the navigation, the sign-out control — still sits in the narrower column. On the archive, above roughly 672px of window width, the page below the header now starts about 112px to the left of the wordmark above it and ends about 112px to the right of the sign-out control. The two do not line up.

Who this affects and what it costs to leave alone: it is visible to the one person who uses Postlude, on any screen wider than a phone, on one of the app's two pages. Nothing is broken and nothing is unreadable — the grid and the masthead are simply not on the same vertical lines. Left alone it reads as an oversight rather than as a decision, which is the kind of thing that erodes a design whose whole argument is restraint.

This is filed rather than fixed because which way it should go is a design question, not a defect:

• The masthead follows the page. The header would have to know which page is below it and take that page's width. That means the frame reads the address, which it currently does not do at all, and the wordmark would shift horizontally as you move between Today and Archive.
• The masthead stays put and the archive accepts the mismatch. The header is the app's furniture, constant across pages; the content below it varies. Publications do this routinely — a masthead at one width over a spread that breaks out of it.
• Everything goes to the wider measure and prose is centred inside it. The most uniform, but it gives up the thing feat: promote warm print to the Postlude design #15 was for: the writing page's column is a reading measure, deliberately narrow.

Recommendation: the second — the masthead stays put. It needs no code, it keeps the frame ignorant of the address, and a constant masthead over varying content is a well-established periodical convention that suits the design's register. But this is a taste call and should be made deliberately rather than by default.

Evidence. apps/web/src/routes/_app.tsx wraps the header's contents in columnClass. apps/web/src/routes/_app/archive.tsx wraps its page in wideColumnClass. Both are defined in apps/web/src/shared/ui/design-classes.ts; the wide one is 224px wider, so each side gains 112px once the window is wide enough for the difference to apply.

Suggested verification. Sign in, open the archive on a window wider than about 800px, and look at whether the grid's left edge lining up with nothing above it reads as wrong. This is the kind of judgment that needs eyes on the running page, not a measurement.

Surfaced by the verification pass on #15. See #15.