Lets one element be styled differently per situation -- a scoreboard's
live / upcoming / recent cards, weather's current / hourly / daily
screens -- under customization.modes.<mode>.
The mode is bound at construction rather than passed per call. That is
what makes this cheap to adopt: SportsUpcoming and SportsRecent are
already separate instances with distinct SKIN_MODE values, so binding
once makes every existing style()/offset_value() call site mode-aware
without editing any of them. A per-call mode argument exists for the rare
host that renders more than one mode.
The two layers answer different questions, deliberately:
- The base layer keeps the existing "differs from the schema default"
rule, because the save flow writes the full default object into
config.json whether or not the user touched it.
- A mode layer is pure override -- its fields default to None, so
presence is intent. Nothing writes into it unasked, so there is nothing
for the stricter rule to protect against.
None therefore means inherit, and has to stay distinct from 0: a mode
y_offset of 0 means "sit at the base position", not "no preference".
This is the same distinction scroll_card.switch_* draws with "inherit".
A malformed mode value falls back to the resolved base value rather than
to the caller's default -- caught by the degradation tests, which is what
they are for: resolving the mode first let one bad string in a mode block
silently discard a good base offset.
With no modes block, and for every existing caller, resolution is
unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
