Band

Tier

directive

Surfaces

page

Fallback

literal

State

settled

A strip across the page — full width, its own breathing room, its content held to the page's text column. It is what a front page is made of.

:::band{tone="soft"}
# Ship it on a Friday<!--sb align="center"-->

Everything here is a file you can read without us.<!--sb align="center"-->
:::

tone is the only attribute this version reads, and the set is closed: soft, strong, accent. Absent means no tint. tone names a token and never a colour — #f5f5f5 is not a value, because a band carrying a colour would be a second styling mechanism. Any other attribute, and a tone outside the set, is carried both ways verbatim and means nothing.

There is no width: a band is full-bleed and its content is constrained, and neither is configurable. A band inside a band is refused; a band inside a column, and a row of columns inside a band, are both ordinary.

Canonical form: no blank line after the opening fence or before the closing one — a blank line there encodes an empty paragraph. tone is written first, every preserved attribute after it alphabetically, all double-quoted. The fence width is computed: one colon more than the longest run inside, so a plain band is :::band and a band holding a columns row is :::::band.