A booth that ships its own index.html was served through ten regular
expressions applied to markup the Booth did not write: six in
wrap_verbatim_html hunting for somewhere to hang a favicon and a chip, four
in booth/inline.py substituting rendered ask markup into the author's own
tags. Both worked. Both were the most fragile thing in the service, on the
path the operator uses most.
The whole class is replaced by a declared seam. A report carries one line —
<script src="/_booth/embed.js" defer></script> — and the chrome mounts
through DOM APIs. What the server does to author HTML is now, in full:
return html if declares_embed(html) else html + EMBED_SCRIPT_TAG
Two substring tests and a concatenation. Both of the old wrapper's hard
constraints stop existing rather than being satisfied more carefully:
nothing can displace a leading doctype into quirks mode and nothing can push
the charset meta out of its detection window, because nothing in front of
them ever moves. A page that declares the seam is served exactly as written.
Fragments are still rendered by the _ask_inline.html macros and handed over
GET /b/<name>/embed.json; embed.js places them and decides nothing. Openness
comes from open_marks, order from (created, id), questions in declaration
order. A single-question pick normalizes to key None, so the payload carries
questions as a list rather than an object — keying by name would serialize
that as the string "null".
Placement is an anchor fill, not a replacement: el.insertAdjacentHTML(
'beforeend'), so an author's wrapper and its contents survive. The regex it
replaces was eating the opening tag of dfa-concepts' styled .ask blocks and
orphaning their headings, live, unreported.
data-booth-mark is canonical; data-booth-ask stays a kept alias because two
live reports use it. The comment placeholders are dropped — no users.
Declared cost: the verbatim path now needs JavaScript. The never-invisible
guarantee holds through the index badge and /b/<name>/marks, both of which
render server-side.
Deleted: booth/inline.py entire, wrap_verbatim_html and its six patterns,
_BACK_CHIP, asks_chip, inject_asks, FAVICON_LINK, the styles() macro.
Tests 410 -> 434. tests/test_embed_browser.py drives a real Chromium: the
placement algorithm and the form= binding of a scattered multi-question form
cannot be observed any other way, and that binding was measured rather than
assumed (N=3 per condition, with a form-first positive control and a
points-at-nothing negative control).
Contract: docs/contracts/u3_declared_embed_seam.contract.md, with the
in-session seam review and the cold contract panel both recorded. Two of the
panel's findings were code fixes: a vacuous INV-3 falsifier that a renamed
regex walked straight through, and a bare-substring seam detection that read
a report merely quoting the path as declaring it and silently served it with
no chrome.
The Booth was built as a file-shuttle on a whim and turned into the fleet's
operator-review surface without anyone deciding that. This is the decision,
written down, with the measurement that forced it.
The defect behind every bolt-on: one lifetime and one shape serving five jobs.
Five separate mechanisms exist to put one question next to one artifact.
Numbers that drove the model, taken against the live service:
- 211 link rows, 145 (69%) pointing at booths that no longer exist
- 22 rows that are the same bench re-posted (talk 5x, peedlar 4x)
- 13 of 24 booths (54%) on the .forever escape hatch
- 270 images rendered as one flat wall, subfolders discarded at render
- 5 commits in one day to ship the asks primitive
Four nouns replace the accretion: booth (derived lifetime), item (one record),
mark (pick/note/flag -- asks, comments and votes were always one thing), and
bench (a registry, not an append log).
v1 is seven capabilities, each closing a measured defect. Compare mode is the
best idea in the set and is parked anyway, because it is the only one that is a
new capability rather than a fix.
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