# Destructive Action Styling

## Objective

Reserve danger styling for the actions that genuinely destroy something.

A single consistent treatment for actions that delete, revoke, or irreversibly change data, applied nowhere else.

## Before You Begin

This feature is being added to an application that already exists and already
works. Do not scaffold a new project, and do not assume a blank slate.

Inspect the codebase first and establish:

- The existing application structure and where code of this kind already lives.
- The framework and version in use.
- The existing design system — colours, spacing, typography, and component conventions.
- Existing UI components you can reuse instead of writing new ones.
- The existing database structure, if this feature needs to persist anything.
- The existing authentication and authorization system, if this feature is user-scoped.
- Dependencies already installed, so you don't add a library that duplicates one.
- The existing test setup and conventions.

Only start writing code once you understand the above. If the application
already implements part of this feature, extend it rather than replacing it.

## Implementation Instructions

1. Audit every button, menu item, and icon control in the app and mark which ones destroy, revoke, or irreversibly change something. Only that set earns the destructive treatment.
2. Distinguish the two kinds of removal in wording and in weight. Archiving or deactivating something recoverable is not the same act as permanently deleting it, and they must not share a visual.
3. Keep destructive actions out of the primary position. They belong in a secondary placement or a menu until the user has chosen them, at which point the confirmation may present the destructive action as its primary control.
4. Do not signal danger with colour alone. Pair the colour with wording that names the object and the consequence, and with an icon or a placement difference, so the meaning survives greyscale, colour blindness, and a forced-colours theme.
5. Do not let the destructive palette spread into error messages, validation text, and required-field markers — if everything urgent is red, nothing is. Which actions qualify and what the treatment means belongs here; the rest, hover, active, focus, and disabled variants of those same controls belong to the Hover Active Focus Checklist.

## UI and UX Requirements

Match the application's existing design system exactly. Reuse its components,
spacing, and typography. This feature should look like it was always there.

## Responsive Requirements

Works on mobile, tablet, and desktop. Touch targets are large enough to hit on a
phone, and nothing overflows horizontally at 320px.

## Accessibility Requirements

- Fully keyboard navigable.
- Correct semantic elements and ARIA roles.
- Visible focus states.
- Meets WCAG AA contrast.
- Dynamic changes are announced to screen readers.
- Respects prefers-reduced-motion.

## Edge Cases

- A soft delete that can be undone from a trash view must not look identical to a permanent purge, or users learn to fear both equally and hesitate over the harmless one.
- Colour alone fails for anyone with a colour vision deficiency, and it fails entirely in a high contrast theme that overrides the palette with system colours.
- A destructive action rendered as the loudest control on the screen gets clicked by accident. It should stay quiet until the user has committed to it inside a confirmation.
- The destructive colour has to meet contrast requirements on hover, while active, while focused, and while disabled, not only at rest — muted danger buttons routinely fall below the threshold once they are dimmed.
- Bulk destructive actions need the affected count in the label and in the confirmation, because deleting one row and deleting four hundred look identical at the moment of the click.
- In a dark theme the usual danger red vibrates against a near-black surface. Pick a value tuned for the dark palette rather than reusing the light one.
- An action that is destructive for other people — revoking a colleague's access, removing a shared record — deserves the same treatment as destroying your own data.

## Testing

Exercise the feature end to end in the running application. Cover every edge case
above, then run the existing test suite and confirm nothing regressed.

## Acceptance Criteria

- [ ] Only actions that delete, revoke, or irreversibly change data carry the destructive treatment.
- [ ] Recoverable removal and permanent removal are distinguishable both visually and in the wording.
- [ ] Destructive intent is carried by wording and placement as well as colour, and survives in greyscale.
- [ ] No destructive control is the visually dominant action on a screen outside a confirmation.
- [ ] The destructive palette meets contrast requirements at rest, on hover, on focus, and when disabled, in both themes.
- [ ] Error and validation styling is visually distinct from destructive action styling.
- [ ] The feature matches the existing design system.
- [ ] No existing functionality is broken.

## Adaptation Rules

- Match the existing design system. Do not introduce a new colour palette,
  spacing scale, or component library.
- Reuse existing components and utilities wherever they fit.
- Follow the naming, file layout, and code style already present.
- Do not upgrade, replace, or remove existing dependencies to make this
  feature fit. Adapt the feature to the app, not the app to the feature.
- Do not break existing functionality. If a change is genuinely required in
  existing code, make the smallest one that works and say so.
- If something in these instructions conflicts with how the application is
  built, follow the application and explain the deviation.

## Final Verification

Before you report the work as done:

1. Re-read the acceptance criteria above and check each one against what you
   actually built.
2. Run the application and exercise the feature end to end.
3. Run the existing test suite and confirm you have broken nothing.
4. Check the feature on mobile, tablet, and desktop widths.
5. Check keyboard navigation and focus handling.
6. Summarize what changed: files added, files modified, and anything you
   deliberately did differently because of how this application is built.

If any acceptance criterion is unmet, fix it before reporting completion.