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The top bar — who gets the width

Pinned cards, a running clock, a board, obligations and notices all want the same strip. On a 375px phone they cannot all have it. The strip below is live — try the scenarios. It shipped in v635; the two as-built notes below record where the build corrected the design.

The reframe.「Pinned」is not a category. Pinning is a property of a CARD; a pill is about your relationship to it. A pinned poll you have already answered is not an obligation — it is just something you might want to find again. Once that is separated, five competitors collapse into two zones and one overlay.

1 · Three behaviours, not five widgets

Zone	What lives there	Behaviour
状态 state	the board · your pad · a running clock · a pinned card you owe nothing on	Things you consult. Always present, never urgent, no verb. Yields width first — this zone compresses down to bare icons before anything else gives an inch.
待办 obligation	a collect you have not answered · a reveal only you can fire · your own row to open	Things you owe. Never compress, never scroll away. Two visible, then `+N`. Tapping locates the card and the pill stays — you have found it, you still owe it.
通知 notice	a timed reveal that just fired · a collect that just opened	Things that happened. Ephemeral: slides in over the STATE zone only, never over an obligation, retracts on its own or on tap. Occupies no permanent width.

as built · v636状态 is the only zone with a PER-VIEWER member. The pad（the eighth tool）pins here and is visible only to its owner — two people looking at the same room see different strips, which no other entry does. It belongs in 状态 by elimination: nothing is owed and nothing expires, so it is not an obligation; and it is not news, so it cannot borrow 通知. It compresses down the same ladder as everything else. Its chip carries a character COUNT, never a first line — the board's chip previews its content because the board is public, and copying that here would print private notes across the top of a phone somebody else can see. The whole strip is computed server-side per viewer（strip_payload）, so the pad's absence from everyone else's is structural rather than a client-side hide.

the priority rule待办 > 状态 > 通知. An obligation is the only thing a person can fail to do, so it is the only thing that may never be squeezed out. State is glanceable and survives being reduced to an icon. A notice is momentary by definition and can borrow space rather than own it.

2 · The strip, live at 375px

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3 · The compression ladder

State items shed detail in a fixed order as obligations take width. They never vanish — a board you cannot reach is worse than a board you cannot read.

Level	Board · Pad	Clock	When
0 roomy	`▤ 记分板 · 12–8`	`◷ 4:32`	no obligations
1 tight	`▤ 12–8`	`◷ 4:32`	one obligation
2 icons	`▤`	`◷ 4:32`	two obligations
3 merged	`▤◷` — one chip, taps to a chooser		three or more（`+N` showing）

The clock keeps its digits one level longer than the board keeps its numbers, because a countdown that does not show time is not a clock — it is a decoration. The pad rides the board's column exactly（▤ 线索 · 28 → ▤ 28 → ▤）— its value is the count, so the rungs shed the same two things in the same order.

as built · v635 → corrected v638The rung is chosen by the tape measure alone. The table above is the design; the build found it is a promise about pixels made without measuring any. The same two obligation pills measure 249px in English against ~210 in Chinese, and a reader at --read-scale 1.3 blows through both — so at level 2 in English the state zone was clipped, which is the one thing §3 forbids. The count now picks the STARTING rung and the measure picks the final one: 状态 escalates until it stops being clipped, and the merged chip drops from three pictures to two to one rather than ever being sliced. Two rungs were added below level 3 for exactly that（4 = two pictures, 5 = one), and the chip still taps to the chooser at every one of them. 待办 bends only one way: when two WHOLE pills will not fit it shows fewer, never smaller — a pill is either whole or it is behind the +N.

owner · v638The FOLD follows the width too —「two, then +N」was the same mistake as the counted rung, and I only fixed half of it. v635 still folded 待办 at a fixed two. On a wide screen that hid chips behind a +N with 400px of empty row beside them; on a phone in a longer language, or at --read-scale 1.3, it over-folded. So the count is gone from both zones and the fit now executes the priority rule rather than asserting it: 状态 sheds detail first, down to one merged picture, and only once it is at its floor does an obligation fold. §3's table above stays the design — it describes what fits at 375px, which is where it was drawn. Measured across eight widths with nothing clipped at any: 1100/917 three pills, no +N, state at level 0 · 760 level 1 · 640 level 2 · 520 three pills + merged ×3 · 430/375 two pills + +1 · 330 one pill + +2. The row re-fits on a ResizeObserver, so the list pane opening beside it or a rotation re-fits it with no reload.

owner · v638A chip must appear and leave on time —「sometimes I have to refresh」means it does not. The cause was T12's pad: its writer repainted the strip it already held instead of re-reading it, so the chip arrived one reload late. Every writer of something the strip SHOWS must re-read the strip, never merely repaint it. The pad has no SSE by design（a fan-out has no viewer and would hand a private pad to the room), so its POST answer now carries the strip. Three more leaks closed with it: a sequence guard（a tap's refresh racing the broadcast it caused could answer out of order and put back a pill the tap had just discharged）, a re-read on fronting（every other path is an event, and a slept phone or a dropped stream has no way to know it missed one — being fronted is when a person looks at the bar), and a 通知 that no longer survives a room switch. And the pad's chip is a PICTURE ONLY — a new icon flag: its value is a character count nobody acts on and its title is the owner's own private wording, which should not be printed across the top of a shared phone. The words stay in the accessible name.

4 · The edges worth deciding now

a pinned card you oweIt appears once, in 待办 — not twice. Pinning made it findable; the obligation is why you are being told. Two pills for one card is the failure this whole reframe exists to prevent.

the strip is per-viewerTwo people in the same room see different strips, so it cannot ride the viewer-less SSE broadcast — same constraint as _shows_content. Get it wrong and the strip leaks who has not answered in exactly the rounds built to hide that.

empty is a stateWith nothing owed and nothing pinned the bar is gone, not empty — no reserved band, no placeholder. The chat starts at the top. A strip that is always there stops being read.

decided before building · 2026-07-27Four owner calls, all taken as recommended. ① A notice is ephemeral and client-side — born from the live SSE event, gone on reload; a notice you have already seen should not return, and the durable copy is the notifications rail's job. So the server payload has no notice field at all. ② This room only — cross-room obligations stay the rail's job, and no new cross-room read path was opened. ③ The +N opens a LIST SHEET（the who-voted shell, reused）rather than expanding in place, because expanding would push the strip past the budget the ladder was designed around; the two visible pills never move. ④ One clock. The first reading of the ladder's ◷ was「the soonest deadline in the room」and the build rejected it: that lets a poll closing in 40s hide a wall clock somebody deliberately set, and a card's own deadline already has two closer homes — the card（ruling ⑨）and, when it is pinned, the chip just above it. The strip's ◷ is the room's wall clock, always. A card's deadline is mirrored here only as its own chip's fused value, or as the soon ring on its obligation pill.

what the build found · ruling ⑫The closed-card riding note told a persona「nothing is wanted of you」on a card the panel itself had to open. That is the one sentence a host would obey, and it had been there since task A. The note now names the act in the pill's own verb（「it is YOURS TO REVEAL — say <reveal>…</reveal>」), once（stamped owed_told on the gate, so a restart does not restart the nagging), and only for a door the grammar actually has: a timer's「open now」and a per-row reveal have no persona door, so the note stays silent about them — the pill's own law（A PILL EXISTS IFF A BUTTON DOES）read from the other side. The same law cost a second fix: a sealed roll's per-row reveal（v634's 各自点开）had a server record and no button on the card, so the dial was settable and unusable — and the strip would have raised an obligation pointing at nothing. The button is built.

what this buysThe fight was never over width — it was over five things claiming the same rank. With obligation as the only protected class, the phone case resolves itself: two pills plus a compressed board and clock fit 375px with room to spare, and the only thing that ever disappears is detail nobody was acting on.

The top bar · designed 2026-07-27 from the owner's question about pills fighting for the bar · extends ruling ⑭（a pill is a tray icon, not an info widget）with the per-viewer obligation test. Architecture: toolbox.html · the lifecycle: tool-lifecycle.html · the sheets: setting-sheet.html. BUILT v635, corrected v638 — the set is computed per viewer on the server（strip_payload, no broadcast channel), the three zones are #tzState / #tzAct / #tzNote, and all six scenarios above reproduce in the real app at 375px, paint-verified in both themes at 37px with nothing clipped — and v638 re-verified the fit across eight widths from 330px to 1100px. The UI reference: the Style Guide.