"3D Gallery" → "Motion Gallery": rename what users see, keep the internal identifiers

The question: the gallery element launched under the name "3D Gallery". But is that the right name? Only some of its designs are actually 3D — and the roadmap makes that gap worse, not better. Should we rename it before launch, and if so, how far does the rename go — just the label, or the folder / tag / CSS / block underneath too?

Context

The element is not a "3D gallery" — it's a gallery-design system with families, and only some are 3D:

• 3D & Perspective (ships now): Carousel Ring, Panorama Wall, Card Sphere, Orbit Globe, Card Tunnel, Spiral Stream, Depth Stack… — genuinely 3D.
• Stack & Scatter: Photo Scatter, Card Stack — 2.5D at most.
• Devices & Screens: Device Cycler — a device mockup, not 3D.
• Coming: Grid, Isometric, Reveal & Wipe, Spotlight & Focus, plus Film Strip / Focus Slider / Mosaic Marquee — several flatly not 3D.

So the moment a visitor picks "Grid" or "Reveal & Wipe" inside a thing called 3D Gallery, the name is lying. The one property every design shares is that it animates.

The second question — how deep to take the rename — matters here because the element is large and old, the opposite of the tiny brand-new Scroll Choreography element (whose folder/tag we did align to its title). A blast-radius grep found 1048 references across 45+ files: the shortcode, a ~500-use tdg__ CSS prefix, a dedicated gallery-3d-preview option-type, a Gutenberg block (blocks/gallery-3d/ with compiled build artifacts), registrations, the build manifest, the playground and the demos. And the gallery_3d tag + the block name live in saved content.

Options considered

What to call it

• Keep "3D Gallery." Accurate only for the family that ships today; a guaranteed future misnomer. Rejected.
• "Animated Gallery." Clear, literal umbrella. Good, but a touch plain.
• "Motion Gallery." Same accurate umbrella, more premium ring for a design-forward builder. Chosen.

How far to rename

• Display name only, keep internal ids. Rename the title / description / builder strings / docs / demo wording to "Motion Gallery"; leave gallery-3d / gallery_3d / tdg__ / the block untouched. Chosen.
• Full internal rename (folder + tag + tdg__ + block + preview option-type + build artifacts + playground + demos). ~1000 edits, a Gutenberg-block rebuild, and it orphans the gallery_3d tag + block name in every saved page. High risk, zero user-visible benefit. Rejected.

Decision

• User-facing name → "Motion Gallery." Builder title, description, preview label, the "coming soon" copy, CATALOG, the Dev Kit doc, the demos (menu, home card, page headings) and the playground all now read "Motion Gallery." Technical "3D" wording that describes actual geometry (3D scene, 3D driver, 3D Curve, Pure CSS 3D) is left alone — it's accurate.
• Internal identifiers unchanged. gallery-3d folder, gallery_3d tag, tdg__ CSS prefix, the gallery-3d-preview option-type and the Gutenberg block keep their names. Saved pages and content are unaffected.

Why

This is the mirror image of the Scroll Choreography naming call, and deliberately so. There, the element was brand-new and ~10 references, so aligning folder + tag + title to one name was free and worth it. Here the element is mature and 1000+ references deep, spanning a block with build artifacts and content-embedded identifiers — so forcing internal consistency would be a large, risky refactor that no user would ever see. The codebase already blesses the split: Model Viewer's folder is model-viewer yet its CSS block is fw-model. The principle: align internal ids to the display name when it's cheap and the element is young; once an element is large and its ids are load-bearing in saved content and build output, rename only what users read.

(Unrelated but done in the same pass: the code carried a third company's product name in developer comments — the reference system the designs were modelled on. All of it was removed; only neutral wording ("the reference design") remains.)