Timeline ahead

The signature is that the current entry, and only the current entry, is a plate with a contrast ground and base type, in a section where everything else sits plainly on base. A roadmap normally needs a legend to say which milestone is current: a dot on the rail, a coloured badge, a "now" label with a key underneath it. This one says it with the single loud object in an otherwise quiet run, and the reader needs nothing explained to them.

That is a portability argument, not a decoration. base and contrast are the only colour slugs the stock block themes share, so inversion is the one colour move that always arrives: an accent plate would be pale pink in one theme and saturated purple in another, and a tinted plate on base-2 resolves to plain white in both stock themes, which is a mark nobody can see. A plate that swaps the section's two guaranteed colours is as legible in the buyer's theme as it is in the preview, and it inverts with them if they recolour either one.

The plate states both halves of its pair, ground and type, and its heading states its own base-chain colour a second time, because a theme's heading element style beats a colour inherited from a wrapping group. That is the mechanism that renders a headline the same colour as the band it sits on, and on an inverted plate it is the difference between the loud entry and an entry with a hole in it.

The second beat: the section thins out toward the future

The entries ahead get the same hairline, the same year column and the same heading size as the entries behind, and shorter copy: two full sentences for 2025, eleven words for 2027, seven for 2028. Nothing is greyed out, nothing is dashed, no colour is spent on it. The future simply has less to say about itself, and the shape of the section says so.

How the rail is built, and why it is unbroken

There is no separator block and no rail element. Each entry is a two-column row whose right-hand column holds a group with a border-left in currentColor, and consecutive rows carry no vertical gap, so those borders touch and form one line. The entries' own top and bottom padding spaces the content, not the gap between rows. This is the technique timeline-rail established; adding or removing an entry cannot break the line.

The rule is currentColor throughout, so it follows the theme's text colour and cannot resolve to nothing. On the inverted row the rule is on the entry group outside the plate, so it stays contrast-coloured and the line runs straight through the loudest part of the section rather than around it.

The columns do not stack. isStackedOnMobile: false keeps the year beside its entry at 390, which is the measured way to beat core's flex-basis: 100% !important. The year column is 16%, about 56px at 390, which holds four digits at the clamp() floor of 18px.