[Tracking] Chat composer review and its industry-standard flag

[HMarzban]

Purpose

This issue tracks the chat composer review of 2026-09-13. It lists every issue that the review filed, and one earlier issue, #263. It also holds one flag. The flag says whether the composer meets the standard in the table below.

The flag

Flag: red.

• Red: an issue in the red list is still open. Those issues lose user data or break a core flow.
• Amber: every issue in the red list is closed, but another issue below is still open.
• Green: every issue below is closed, and the chatroom Cypress specs run in CI.

Update the flag when an issue closes. Move to amber only when every issue in the red list is closed.

The standard

Area	Standard	Reference
Data integrity	A send, an edit, a mode switch, or a saved draft never drops text, formatting, or media. A failed send keeps its text for another try, and never posts twice. The one exception is a draft upload that the daily cleanup removed, and its tile says it expired.	Common practice in chat products
What you see is what you send	The composer offers only formatting that the sent message keeps. An edit with no text and no attachment left never offers a send that must fail.	Common practice in rich text chat
First message	The first message or comment on a heading with no channel row creates the row and sends.	Common practice in chat products
Voice notes	Release ends a hold. A slide cancels or locks. The composer's 5-minute cap stops a long note.	Slide to cancel and slide to lock follow Telegram and WhatsApp. There, release sends the note. Here, release shows a preview, as #265 asks. The cap is the composer's own limit.
Keyboard	Escape closes one layer at a time.	WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices, combobox and dialog patterns
Overlays	One composer overlay is open at a time. The link dialog leaves the soft keyboard as it found it, except where #285 changes the rule on purpose.	The chatroom and extensions agent docs
Focus	No positive tabindex, and focus follows the visual order. A chat open that asks for focus gets it.	WCAG 2.2, success criterion 2.4.3
Names, roles, and states	Every control has an accessible name. A toggle exposes its state. Menus, lists, and handles work with a keyboard. Live regions do not repeat.	WCAG 2.2, success criteria 4.1.2 and 4.1.3, and the WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices
Toolbar state	A format button shows its active state as the caret moves.	Common practice in rich text toolbars
Touch targets	The composer row buttons and every control that #279 lists have a touch target of at least 44 × 44 px on a phone.	The design system ComposerBar row: "action targets 44px mobile". WCAG 2.2, success criterion 2.5.8, sets 24 px as the floor.
File limits	A file over the size limit that the composer does not downscale is refused when it is added. A size failure offers no Retry.	Common practice in chat products
Layout and loading	A skeleton has the size of what replaces it, and never stays next to an error. A signed-in member sees the composer, not a join prompt.	Core Web Vitals, Cumulative Layout Shift
Notifications	A mention notifies the named member, and an email address mentions nobody.	Common practice in chat products
Verification	Chat flows run in CI, and a failing chat spec fails its job.	Common practice
Code health and docs	No dead code except what the house rules keep, and SignInToJoinChannel, which #274 leaves for a separate decision. No any in the chat store fields and broadcast payloads that #272 lists. No leaked listeners, no needless re-renders, and agent docs that match the code.	AGENTS.md §Code Quality and §Workflow And Review Expectations. No house rule bans any in general, and the shared ESLint config turns @typescript-eslint/no-explicit-any off. This review sets that part.

Issues

Red list: data loss or a broken core flow

• Keep a long chat edit whole, and never send an empty chunk #264
• Keep the attachments of a reply or comment while it sends #266
• Stop chat drafts from dropping attachments or listing deleted uploads #267
• Keep the unsent draft when the user edits a message #277
• Keep the unsent draft when reply, comment, or edit mode changes, or the chat reopens #296
• Keep a message's media when Edit starts from reply or comment mode #295
• Keep a comment's text when it fails to send #281
• Stop a failed media send from being posted twice #290
• Stop the chat composer from showing formatting that sending removes #287
• Make hold-to-record respond to release, lock, cancel, and the 5-minute cap #265
• Let the first Escape close only the mention picker or the link popover #268
• Stop Escape in the media gallery from also clearing reply, edit, or comment #297
• Send the first comment on a heading that has no chat yet #298

Amber list: other user-facing issues, and the CI job

• Fix accessible names, pressed state, and live regions in the chat composer #288
• Make the composer insert menu, mention picker, and emoji panel handle work with a keyboard and a screen reader #289
• Remove the positive tabindex from the chat composer input #270
• Give the phone composer's small controls a 44 px touch target #279
• Show active state in the mobile format grid #269
• Show the active state of the composer's Inline code button #282
• Close the composer emoji panel when a voice recording starts #284
• Keep the keyboard state when the composer link dialog opens and cancels #285
• Focus the requested chat composer when it appears #294
• Match the desktop composer skeleton to the loaded composer #275
• Drop the composer and participants skeletons when the channel data load fails #283
• Run the chat join step when the profile loads after the chat opens #292
• Stop the failing send for an edit with no text and no attachment left #291
• Refuse an oversized chat file when it is added, not after it fails #280
• Notify the right people when a chat message contains an @ #293
• Run the webapp Cypress suite in CI #276

Code health and docs

• Rename the composer ToolbarButton type prop, and drop two dead send props #271
• Replace any with real types in the chat stores and broadcast payloads #272
• Remove the unused typing map and the dead pin listener #273
• Remove dead chat composer code #274
• Stop the desktop emoji picker from re-rendering on every chat store change #278
• Correct stale code claims in the agent docs and the design system #286

Earlier issue

• Send hand-off from the chat composer into the feed #263

#263 is not a review finding. It fixes the send-and-retry spec, and #276 lands after it. #266, #281, and #290 change the same early clear.

How the review worked

• Readers mapped the composer in seven areas and wrote down claims. Eight more readers closed the gaps that a completeness check named. Two verifiers checked each claim independently.
• Eight red issues were reproduced with scratch harnesses that load the real modules: Keep a long chat edit whole, and never send an empty chunk #264, Make hold-to-record respond to release, lock, cancel, and the 5-minute cap #265, Let the first Escape close only the mention picker or the link popover #268, Keep the unsent draft when the user edits a message #277, Stop the chat composer from showing formatting that sending removes #287, Keep a message's media when Edit starts from reply or comment mode #295, Keep the unsent draft when reply, comment, or edit mode changes, or the chat reopens #296, and Send the first comment on a heading that has no chat yet #298. Some harnesses copy the code that calls those modules, and each issue says which.
• The voice recorder hook, the TipTap suggestion plugin, the composer draft hooks, and the channel metadata hook ran in a DOM emulator. The insert policy half of Send the first comment on a heading that has no chat yet #298 ran on the local Supabase stack, in a transaction that was rolled back. The outbound message pipeline and the send sanitizer also ran in Chrome.
• The other red issues rest on a code trace, and some add a model harness. Each issue states its evidence level.
• No red issue was reproduced end to end in the running app.
• One skeptical reviewer checked each issue against the code before it was filed.
• On 2026-09-14, a second review checked all 37 issues: Send hand-off from the chat composer into the feed #263, the 35 child issues, and this one. A senior engineer reviewed each issue except this one, six set-level lenses checked the whole set, and four HoE judges verified every edit. Of the 37, 36 got small edits, one needed none, and none was merged or closed.
• Every file and line reference in the child issues is on 14ab7f9c1. The two later commits change only files for the hypermultimedia README images.