bdeshi
581d6c08ee
Twenty-seven ADRs existed before a line of Go. Five specified the shape of unbuilt mechanisms — cache validity, declared types, the settings cascade, taxonomies, extras — which breaks the rule against abstraction before a second concrete use, in prose where the counters cannot see it. They move to ideas/deferred-decisions.md as recorded intent and return shaped by whatever implements them. Citations retargeted throughout; where one was decoration the rule now stands on its own reasoning. Type declarations and the cascade drop to [spec] with the MVP behaviour stated instead, so the first prompts have less to build. conventions.md names http.ServeMux as the router, closing a hole that invited hand-rolling a path splitter. The ADR gate now checks a number is registered in the log rather than headed by an entry, so withdrawals resolve and invented numbers still fail. Two architecture invariants corrected: identity no longer implies a required language suffix, and the duplicated permalink clause is gone.
4.4 KiB
Theme contract
What the engine promises a theme, and the only thing this repository is bound to (ADR-0023). A theme's markup, layout and styling are not the engine's business; a theme's inputs are.
STATUS: not built. This is the shape the contract takes when the first template renders. Everything here is engine obligation, not theme instruction — a theme may ignore any of it.
The stability rule
Fields and names are added, never renamed or removed. Absence is always legal: a template reading a
field that does not exist gets the zero value and must not crash, and the engine must not make a missing
field fatal at request time (ADR-0002, invariant 1). This is the View-layer freeze from
architecture.md, arriving as soon as a theme exists rather than at Arc 2.
Breaking the contract is not a feature — it is a new contract version, and it needs an ADR.
What the engine provides
| Provides | Detail |
|---|---|
| the page object | known fields plus an Extra bag carrying unknown frontmatter (ADR-0002) |
| the resolved cascade | settings after site → section → bundle resolution (ideas/deferred-decisions.md) |
| queries the page needs | its sequence neighbours, its taxonomy terms, its section's members |
| named template lookup | per-type sets; a theme redefines a named block and inherits the rest (ADR-0019) |
| URLs | every path the engine emits, so a theme never constructs one by hand |
| per-page assets | the styles / scripts frontmatter lists, resolved relative to the bundle |
| chrome strings | looked up by key and language, never hardcoded English in a template |
| validity windows | a template that renders time-dependent output declares one |
Extras view
For a request under a bundle's extras directory (ideas/deferred-decisions.md) the engine additionally provides:
| Field | Contents |
|---|---|
.Extras.Entries |
the tree: Name, Path, URL, RawURL, Kind, Size, IsDir, ModTime |
.Extras.Selected |
nil on the bare listing; otherwise the chosen entry |
.Extras.Selected.HTML |
rendered output for markdown and text kinds; empty otherwise |
.Extras.Selected.RawURL |
always present — for <img src>, <object data>, or a download link |
.Bundle is the parent, so a theme has its title, language and breadcrumb. Selecting an entry is an
ordinary link and a full re-render, so a sidebar-plus-pane layout needs no JavaScript; swapping the pane
client-side is a later enhancement over working markup, never a requirement.
What the engine does not provide
Layout, class names, CSS, client-side behaviour, and any choice about how something looks — including how media is embedded, how a listing is arranged, and whether something appears in a sidebar. Those are theme decisions, and a request touching them is split: a contract extension here, a change there.
The engine also does not provide a component library, a CSS build step, or a JavaScript runtime.
conventions.md holds the output floor the engine itself meets — semantic HTML, zero-JS, every image
carrying width, height and alt — and a theme is expected to stay inside it, but the engine does not
enforce a theme's markup.
The reference theme
The binary embeds a reference theme — templates plus one small stylesheet — so a bare site root renders (ADR-0026). It exists to make this document executable: it implements every field and block named here and nothing else, and a golden-file test through it catches contract regressions before a real theme does.
It is not a design. Legibility only, no branding, no visual opinions, no JavaScript — verify.sh fails on
a <script tag in it. If it starts accumulating taste, it has stopped being a reference.
It demonstrates the contract; it is not the contract. Changing it does not change what a theme may rely on
— which is why verify.sh also fails when it changes without this document changing, since in practice the
two drift together.
Splitting a request
When a feature spans engine and theme, this repo delivers:
- the contract extension — new fields, new named blocks, new queries, new URLs;
- a note stating what a theme must do to use it, precise enough to act on without this conversation;
- embedded defaults updated far enough to prove the extension works.
It does not deliver the theme. Claiming otherwise is the same error as claiming to have migrated content in a site root this repo cannot see.