A textarea is a poor place to hand-write a nested `_meta` payload. Ace closes a
brace when you open one, folds nested objects, and — through its JSON worker —
marks the offending line in the gutter instead of reporting one message for the
whole document.
Three things the swap turned up:
- Ace fires *two* change events for a replace (a remove, then an insert), so
select-all-and-retype briefly leaves an empty document. Acting on the first
emitted `{}` and wiped the user's saved metadata the instant they selected
it. `handleChange` now coalesces the pair in a microtask, and the component
tracks what it last emitted so the parent echoing that value back is not
mistaken for an external reset.
- Ace's own `github` themes fail WCAG AA on the gutter — `#AAA` on `#e8e8e8` is
1.89:1, and the dark theme is 4.13:1. Folding needs the gutter, so the colors
are overridden with palette tokens (5.82:1 and 4.88:1) rather than hiding it.
- `textInputAriaLabel` alone never reaches the DOM: Ace composes the label as
"<label>, Cursor at row N" and only recomputes it when the cursor moves, so
it is forced once on load. Until then the control's only accessible name is a
position readout.
Testing is split because Ace's input path does not work under happy-dom at all
— `userEvent.type` reaches the textarea and produces no edit, so a test written
that way asserts nothing. Unit tests drive the editor instance through a shared
`src/test/aceEditor.ts` helper; the real keyboard behaviour (`{` then Enter
giving `{\n \n}`) is asserted by Storybook play functions in Chromium.
`react-ace`/`ace-builds` are declared in `clients/web` rather than the root, per
the rule for a dependency that renders React components.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0177mPHAdECD18nLLCTwR5rh
Signed-off-by: cliffhall <cliff@futurescale.com>
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