Skeleton

Divergences, open decisions, and undocumented gaps for Skeleton.

See Skeleton for the decided part of this page.

Known issues

ID	Kind	What
TITAN-GAP-31	Open decision	The component has no tokens, no theme overrides, and no design representation
TITAN-GAP-01	Open decision	Modes are undesigned, so no dark-scheme skeleton colour is specified

Also true and not yet recorded as either: it has no theme overrides, no tokens, and no representation in the design library — verified across the component’s own directory, the twenty-six components that do carry overrides, the token set, and the shared and legacy packages; it is also the most heavily used component in this area (see the generated adoption figures at the foot of the main page), so the system’s most-used loading primitive is the one it has decided least about; the animation does not respond to prefers-reduced-motion; and three applications carry what appears to be the same TabLoadingSkeleton file.

Gaps in the current rules

• No colour decision. The skeleton grey comes from the framework and no token names it, so it is the one grey in the product outside the palette.
• pulse or wave is undecided. Both ship, both are used, and neither is recorded as the system’s.
• No radius decision. rounded does not use the radius scale.
• No duration threshold. “Do not show one under about a second” is this page’s proposal; nothing upstream states when a skeleton is warranted.
• No sanctioned skeleton screens. A table, a card, and a form all have knowable skeletons and the system provides none, which is why applications keep writing their own.
• Whether a skeleton may be reused as a disabled or placeholder state is unstated, and it is a common misuse.

Constraints Titan should enforce

These are real, currently-true rules. Nothing in code stops a builder from violating them today — each is a placeholder for a guardrail Titan hasn’t built, not a decision still being made.

ID	Constraint	Would be enforced by
TITAN-SKL-04	One animation style per screen.	A lint rule scanning a view for mixed pulse/wave values.
TITAN-SKL-05	Respects prefers-reduced-motion.	A default animation value driven by a shared reduced-motion hook.
TITAN-SKL-06	Hidden from assistive technology.	An automated accessibility test asserting aria-hidden on rendered Skeletons.