A theme renders a vocabulary; it configures no rune

Decision

Option 3.

1. A theme owns how each piece of meaning looks, and nothing about which meaning a rune has. What it supplies:

   The theme supplies	Through
   How each piece of meaning looks: meta types, sentiment, zone layouts, axes, primitive classes	CSS, in the structure (skeleton) and skin layers
   Design values	tokens
   Named looks an author can choose	presets: tints, backgrounds, frames
   Drawings	glyph and ornament sets (SPEC-164)
   How each kind of value is formatted	formats (decision 4)
   Page chrome and interactive behaviour	layouts, components
   Special cases	CSS on [data-rune], [data-field], [data-value]

   What it does not supply:

   Not the theme's	Whose
   Which fields a rune shows, their order, layout, labels, and sentiment mapping	the rune's definition
   Translations of a rune's text	the definition's owner, overridable by the site (SPEC-145 D29)
   A rune's structure	the definition, or core for a primitive

   (Amended by ADR-045: for a composed rune, the order, layout and structure rows are the definition's by default, and a theme or site may arrange them with a replacement template. Which fields, labels and sentiment mapping stay the definition's.)

2. All of metaFields is the definition's. SPEC-158 D3 made metaFields.*.metaType identity and left label, sentimentMap and transform presentational, so that a theme had something to override. Seen without that need, all three are claims about content:

   • sentimentMap says that "hard" is cautionary, which is the content author's statement;
   • label is copy, which SPEC-145 D29 translates as such;
   • transform names a kind of formatting, whose style is decision 4's.

   metaFields becomes identity as a whole, for every rune.

3. The engine emits meaning, not shape. The engine stops adding rf-badge to field values.

   • Pill geometry comes from the base stylesheet (@refrakt-md/skeleton), keyed on [data-meta-type="status"], "category" and "tag", and a theme restyles it like any other rule.
   • {% badge %} keeps its rf-badge class, because a badge is an authored pill. It already emits data-meta-type="tag" by default (packages/runes/src/tags/badge.ts), so the base rule covers it either way.
   • This closes SPEC-145 D28's open question on which values are chips. Under D28 decision 8, a chip and a plain value are already the same element; this removes the last difference the engine imposes.

4. Formatting style is a theme-wide setting: formats. "15m" or "15 minutes", "Oct 12" or "12 October 2026" is a presentation choice, but today it is fixed per field (transform: 'duration', and the locale-aware formatDurationLocale). Instead:

   • the output always carries the machine value: <time datetime="PT15M">, data-value;
   • the definition says what kind of value it is (metaType: temporal, transform: duration);
   • the theme says how that kind of value is displayed, once, for every rune: formats: { duration: "long", date: "medium", number: "compact" };
   • a site may override the theme's formats, as it overrides tokens.

   It is the one config lever about fields that a theme gains, and it is global, so it never names a rune or a field.

5. Coverage replaces per-rune guarantees. A theme that cannot configure a rune cannot promise that the rune looks right, and does not need to: it needs to cover the vocabulary. A check reports, for every vocabulary value (each metaType, sentiment, zone layout, axis value and glyph concept), whether the theme styles it or leaves it to the base stylesheet. It extends Lumina's existing selector coverage test (packages/lumina/test/css-coverage.test.ts) from BEM selectors to vocabulary values. A theme that covers the vocabulary renders every composed rune, including runes written after it shipped.

6. Native runes keep their theme override path as legacy. ADR-028's guard still applies to them, and the runes: section of a theme's config stays valid for them until ADR-042's follow-up settles each one. No new theme lever is added there. Site-level component overrides (overrides, by typeof) are untouched: they replace a component, not a config, and are the site's choice, not the theme's.