Forest Floor Stress Case

This page deliberately crowds the hard cases together so contrast and token failures have nowhere to hide.

Long prose, muted metadata, many links, long chart labels, D3 tooltip, D3 Focus, D3 Compare, a dense Mermaid diagram, a quote-panel, reel controls, and keyboard focus — all on Forest Floor, all at once.

Forest Floor has to stay comfortable to read for more than a sentence. The primary text tone is a warm ivory that sits at roughly fourteen to one against the charcoal ground, well past the threshold for body text at this size. Secondary prose steps down to a quieter ivory-grey, and metadata — the tone used for captions, timestamps, source lines, and the quietest labels — steps down again to a lichen grey that still clears the contrast requirement for normal text. None of these are the same colour used for a link, and none of them are the field accent.

The rules between things are quiet on purpose. An ordinary divider is a low-contrast mineral line that you register without it demanding attention; a strong structural divider — the border under a table header, the line above a figure — is a lighter grey-green that reads clearly as structure. Depth on Forest Floor comes from these tonal surfaces, from spacing, and from typography, not from drop shadows, glows, or floating cards. This is still Musewoods editorial grammar; the Ground changed, the grammar did not.

A paragraph like this one, several sentences long, with no headings to break it up, is the real test. If the measure is right and the tone is right, it reads like a page in a field notebook. If either is wrong, a wall of low-contrast text on a dark ground is exactly the kind of generic-dark failure Forest Floor is meant to avoid.