Made reduced‑motion honest after finding eleven selectors still animating under the preference, because a universal transition‑none rule loses on specificity to any rule carrying a class.

Situation. The site honoured the reduce‑motion preference with a single rule turning off every transition. It read as complete, it lints clean, and under an emulated reduce‑motion preference eleven selectors were still animating.

Task. The preference had to be honoured in fact, and the reason the obvious rule failed had to become something the next person cannot repeat.

Action. The cause is specificity. A universal rule scores at the bottom of the cascade and loses to any rule carrying a class, so a blanket transition‑none is beaten by every considered animation on the page — which is every animation worth turning off. The fix was structural rather than a patch: anything that moves now lives in one late stylesheet part, and a linter fails a transitioned transform anywhere else. The distinction the rule draws is deliberate and narrower than the obvious one: reduce motion, not colour. A colour fade is not motion and turning it off makes interfaces feel broken to people who did not ask for that, so a transition listing colour properties passes and a transition on movement does not. Motion is also required to be expressed as a transition rather than a keyframe animation, because the former is trivially cancellable and the latter is not. Two related traps came out of the same work and are recorded with measurements: a menu ornament was thirty‑one degrees through a sixty‑degree turn before it was half visible, and because the shape is periodic a half‑turn looks identical for a third of the cost; and five different properties each make an element the containing block for anything positioned relative to the viewport, which had silently shrunk a dismiss layer to a fraction of the screen.

Result. The preference is honoured in fact rather than in intent, and eleven live animations that a blanket rule appeared to have covered are actually covered. The general lesson is the one written at the top of that document: a rule that loses on specificity fails silently, and every report calls it something else.