say-it-once

Say it once

Each fact a reader sees appears in one place on the screen. A second copy costs space above the answer and makes the reader check whether the two copies differ. design.md holds the rules; this skill is the procedure for applying them.

Steps

1. Open the rendered surface in Chromium at 1450px and at 390px. Use the built site from a clean worktree, or the live site for an unchanged surface. Do not judge from source alone: most past duplicates were assembled at runtime.
2. List every element above the main answer (chart, ranking, list), top to bottom. For each, write the one fact it carries.
3. Group the elements by fact. A group with two or more members is a candidate. Also flag any element whose fact is unreadable alone, such as a bare number with no label (94.6 above a chart that already says Best reported score: 94.6).
4. For each candidate, keep the copy in the place the reader looks for that fact, and remove the others. Before removing, check that the copy is not the only one that:
   • carries state or a control: keyboard, phone width, Back and Forward, the URL;
   • carries an accessible name. Move that text into aria-label, as eb1b872 did, instead of dropping it;
   • is unique evidence: provenance, a caveat no other element states, a citation.
5. Machine copies are not duplicates. Meta description, og: tags, JSON-LD, feeds, and datePublished serve crawlers and previews (cbda65c). Leave them.
6. Check order as well as count. A block shared across surfaces follows each surface's job (design.md, "A shared block follows the surface's job").
7. Take before and after screenshots at the same viewport. For each removal, name in the commit message the element that already says it: "X already says Y".

Patterns from this repo's history