theme.hardcode color

theme.hardcode-color

Rule ID: theme.hardcode-color Severity: WARN Category: theme Target Standards: W3C Design Tokens Community Group (DTCG), Tailwind CSS Design Token Architecture, WCAG 2.2 Contrast Predictability

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1. Overview & Core Invariant

Detects hardcoded arbitrary hex or rgb color literals in Tailwind utility classes and arbitrary properties

Core Invariant:

"Color declarations in markup must use centralized semantic design tokens or CSS variables, never arbitrary raw hex or color function literals."

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2. Technical Grounding & Engine Realities

Directly embedding raw hex or rgb colors (e.g. bg-[#2563eb] or [color:#fff]) inside UI components creates serious maintenance barriers:

1. Theme Blindness: Arbitrary color values cannot respond to dark mode, high-contrast, or tenant theme switching.
2. Design Drift: Slight variations in hex codes (e.g. #2563eb vs #2564ea) fracture visual consistency.
3. Inflexible Rebranding: Global style updates require searching and replacing thousands of isolated class strings.

Charites enforces migrating arbitrary color literals to semantic tokens defined in global.css (e.g. bg-primary, text-card-foreground).

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3. Vulnerability & Risk Taxonomy

Risk Vector	Severity	Impact
Theme Inflexibility	HIGH	Hardcoded hex values remain static during dark mode toggle, causing illegible text and broken contrast.
Maintenance Bloat	MEDIUM	Scattered arbitrary colors prevent centralized palette changes and design system updates.

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4. Non-Compliant Code Patterns (Bad Examples)

ASTRO (Arbitrary hex color in class attribute):

<div class="bg-[#1e293b] text-[#f8fafc] [color:#fff]">Un-tokenized Card</div>

TSX (Arbitrary rgb and hex literals in JSX):

export function Badge() {
  return <span className="hover:bg-[#2563eb] text-[rgb(255,0,0)]">Status</span>;
}

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5. Compliant Implementation Patterns (Good Examples)

ASTRO (Using semantic tokens and CSS variables):

<div class="bg-card text-card-foreground">Tokenized Card</div>

TSX (Semantic token utility with dark mode support):

export function Badge() {
  return <span className="hover:bg-primary text-destructive">Status</span>;
}

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6. Detection & Verification Pipeline (How The Rule Evaluates Code)

This theme rule evaluates source templates against the project's design token graph:

flowchart TD
    Node["AST Node (Astro / TSX element)"] --> Extract["1. Extract Class Names (e.g. 'hover:bg-primary/10')"]
    Extract --> Strip["2. Strip Variants (hover:, dark:, sm:) -> 'bg-primary/10'"]
    Strip --> Split["3. Split Opacity Modifier -> Utility: 'bg-primary', Opacity: '/10'"]
    Split --> Convention["4. Query TokenConvention (Candidate: '--color-primary-light')"]
    Convention --> GraphQuery{"5. Check Token Graph (Does token exist in active scope?)"}
    GraphQuery -- "No (Banana Test)" --> Safe["Pass (Valid Custom / Untokenized Color)"]
    GraphQuery -- "Yes (Official Token Exists)" --> IgnoreCheck{"6. Check charites:ignore directive"}
    IgnoreCheck -- "Ignored" --> Safe
    IgnoreCheck -- "Not Ignored" --> Diag["7. Emit Diagnostic: theme.hardcode-color with Replacement Suggestion"]

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Step-by-Step Evaluation:

1. AST Node Traversal: internal/analyzer streams JSX/Astro AST elements to the rule's Evaluate visitor.
2. Variant Normalization: Strips responsive (sm:, md:), interaction state (hover:, focus:), and theme (dark:) prefixes to isolate the core utility class.
3. Modifier Extraction: Parses utility segments and extracts slash opacity modifiers.
4. Token Convention Resolution: Consults the TokenConvention adapter to determine the official semantic design token replacement candidate.
5. Token Graph Verification (Banana Test): Queries token.Context to verify that the candidate token is declared in global.css or tokens.json within the element's scope. If not declared, the custom value is permitted without a false-positive diagnostic.
6. Directive Suppression Check: Inspects preceding AST comments for charites:ignore theme.hardcode-color.
7. Diagnostic Emission: Produces a structured diagnostic with line number, column span, and actionable replacement suggestion.

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7. Verification & Test Harness (How The Test Works: 1-SSOT Tri-Corpus)

This rule is rigorously tested and validated across the canonical 1-SSOT Tri-Corpus in tests/correctness/theme.hardcode-color/:

flowchart TD
    subgraph GoldenCorpus ["1-SSOT Tri-Corpus Test Matrix for theme.hardcode-color"]
        subgraph P ["Positive Corpus (tests/correctness/theme.hardcode-color/positive/)"]
            P1["P1: Obvious Direct Violation"]
            P2["P2: Indirect / Variant Concatenation"]
            P3["P3: Helper / clsx / cn Wrapper"]
            P4["P4: Deeply Nested Elements"]
            P5["P5: Aliased Imports / Re-exports"]
        end
        subgraph N ["Negative Corpus (tests/correctness/theme.hardcode-color/negative/)"]
            N1["N1: Valid Design Tokens"]
            N2["N2: Explicit charites:ignore Directive"]
            N3["N3: Third-Party / Vendor Components"]
            N4["N4: Clean Semantic HTML"]
            N5["N5: Untokenized Custom Values (Banana Test)"]
        end
        subgraph A ["Adversarial Corpus (tests/correctness/theme.hardcode-color/adversarial/)"]
            A1["A1: Template Literal Interpolations"]
            A2["A2: Ternary Conditional Expressions"]
            A3["A3: Spread Properties & Dynamic Overrides"]
            A4["A4: Dynamic Object Class Syntax"]
            A5["A5: Shadowed Variable Identifiers"]
            A6["A6: Nested Closures & HOC Wrappers"]
            A7["A7: Obfuscated Classes & Cyclic Tokens"]
        end
    end

    P --> TestRunner["Automated Runner (rule_test.go)"]
    N --> TestRunner
    A --> TestRunner
    TestRunner --> Gates["Quality Gates: Zero Panic, Zero False-Positive, Zero Bypass"]

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• Positive Fixtures (P1-P5): Verified to trigger diagnostics at exact lines and column spans.
• Negative Fixtures (N1-N5): Verified to produce zero diagnostics on valid tokens and legitimate exemptions.
• Adversarial Fixtures (A1-A7): Verified to prevent evasion across dynamic expressions, string interpolations, and cyclic references.

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8. How to Suppress (Ignore Directives)

If this pattern is required for an intentional exception, suppress the diagnostic using the canonical Charites Rule ID:

<!-- charites:ignore theme.hardcode-color intentional exception -->

// charites:ignore theme.hardcode-color intentional exception

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9. Configuration Reference (charites.yaml)

rules:
  theme.hardcode-color:
    severity: warn # error | warn | info | off