Standards by Applied Form

A design-system conformance gate measured in a real browser. Give it a DTCG token file and a page; it renders the page in Chromium at four fixed widths and two sampled ones, under reduced motion and in print, and checks every computed value against the system's rules. It reports what the browser drew, not what the stylesheet says.

Standards is open so the evidence about it can be checked. Every comparison it is quoted in can be rerun from this repository: the gate beside axe-core and stylelint, the drift survey of public design systems, and the model study and its judging rounds, with every record they were scored from.

Start

npm install @appliedform/standards && npx playwright install chromium
npx standards init --pack instrument  # load a system: the free Standards pack, or your pack's tokens.json
npx standards lint page.html          # your page, judged by that system's rules, at every width

With no system loaded, standards lint judges a page by the rules that hold for any page (contrast, focus, target size, overflow, alt text, heading order, motion) and says how to load one. For an agent, npx standards mcp-config prints the server block for Claude Code or Cursor.

Use

npx standards lint page.html https://example.com/page      # every rule, every width
npx standards lint https://example.com/ --register ii      # a page that has not declared a register
npx standards baseline https://example.com/a --out standards-baseline.json
npx standards lint https://example.com/a --baseline standards-baseline.json
npx standards fix page.html                                # apply the fixes it can make; writes page.fixed.html
npx standards audit pages/ --fix                           # every page in a folder, as found and as the fixer would leave it, as one report
npx standards drift https://example.com/ --out drift.json  # what system a site actually renders
npx standards rules                                        # every rule, its severity and what it checks
npx standards mcp                                          # the same tools for a model, over MCP

standards fix exits 0 when the fixed page passes every checked rule, 1 when violations remain, and lists what it could not fix by rule and element. standards audit writes one self-contained HTML page (and --json) with the findings by rule and by page, the WCAG criteria the rules touch, what is not checked, and the command that repeats the run. standards lint exits 1 on any error-severity violation not held in the baseline. standards.config.json sets a rule to error, warn or off; standards.config.example.json is a starting point. The exception is a mandatory rule: contrast, text-too-small, target-size, focus-hidden, link-not-underlined, alt-missing, horizontal-overflow and wordmark-live-text, listed under $extensions["form.applied"].levels.mandatory in the token file. A config that sets one of them to warn or off is refused, and standards lint exits 2 (decision 0027 in the Applied Form repository). A system loaded over the token file may raise the thresholds contrast and text-too-small read (floors.body-contrast, display-contrast, large-text-px, large-bold-text-px, text-min-px) and is refused if it lowers one below the token file's own value. A system that declares a pack and states no register.pack is refused too: it judged every page by register alone and then dropped that house rule, so no mandatory rule was measured. So is a system with a register whose background is not a colour. Four gaps are known. On a page whose register the loaded system does not define, with or without a system, a config that lowers register leaves the mandatory rules unmeasured. A system file that declares itself a pack is judged without text-too-small, link-not-underlined and wordmark-live-text. On a page that paints no ground, contrast measures against the ground the system

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