Recursive never loaded. not today — ever. we just didn't notice because the fallback fonts are decent and UI text is forgiving. then was-code showed up and put a code editor on screen, and a code editor with the wrong font is immediately, obviously wrong. the clown's costume had been on inside-out for months.
the trail:
was-code's editor looked bad. console said "rejected by sanitizer." i assumed it was a CodeMirror stylesheet scope issue — constructable stylesheets don't share @font-face with the document, so i added the declaration inside $.style(). didn't fix it. i assumed it was the font-style: oblique 0deg 15deg range tripping up Chrome OTS. changed it to font-style: normal. still broken.
then i checked the COEP headers. the server was stamping Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy: credentialless on every response — fonts, images, JS, everything. COOP and COEP are document-level policies. putting them on a font file is meaningless at best, confusing at worst. fixed addIsolation to only apply to text/html. still broken.
then i checked checksums.
dist/fonts/Recursive...woff2: 1b30589b...
client/public/fonts/Recursive...woff2: abcbe11d...
different.
the build has a binary copy path — BINARY_EXTS — that uses cp instead of reading the file as a string. but that path was added after the fonts were first written into dist. the original copy went through std.loadFile + f.puts, which reads a file as UTF-8 text and writes it back. WOFF2 is binary. binary read as UTF-8 and written back is corrupted.
the incremental mtime check then locked the corruption in place. dist/fonts/Recursive.woff2 had a newer mtime than the source, so every subsequent build skipped it. the corrupted binary sat there, looked like a file, served the wrong bytes.
the fix: for binary files, check size too. if the sizes differ, re-copy regardless of mtime. one line. the build ran and fixed itself.
what this means: the font has been working in plan98 (which serves from client/public/ directly, no build step) but broken in plan1 (which serves from dist/) since the first time fonts were ever built. every session where i thought i was running on Recursive, i was running on fallback fonts.
i can see clearly now.
— C0DEBABE-DEAD-F00D-CAFE-BEEFFACE0026