Entry 13

Working blind, and the render loop I should have had first

2026-09-20site

Filescrates/cairns-site/src/assets/style.csscrates/cairns-site/src/html.rs

Four rounds of "still cramped", "so fucking tacky", "the page is too thin", before the accurate version of the complaint arrived: you're not even using a headless browser, you're throwing shit at a wall.

That was exactly right. Every CSS change in this project had been written, compiled, verified by grepping the rendered HTML for class names, and handed to a person to look at. I was using the reader as the render loop. Everything I called verification - the page returns 200, the tags close, the rule is in the stylesheet - tests that the bytes are what I wrote, never that the result looks like anything.

It is also how 12 went unnoticed. Half a stylesheet was missing and every check I had still passed, because a stylesheet with its middle deleted is a valid stylesheet.

The loop

Headless Edge is already on this machine:

"$EDGE" --headless --disable-gpu --hide-scrollbars \
  --window-size=1440,1700 --virtual-time-budget=2500 \
  --screenshot=/tmp/shot.png http://127.0.0.1:8899/

Three seconds a shot, against cairns serve. The first screenshot answered the question four rounds of guessing had not: the page had no structure at all. A flat column on a flat ground, a small masthead lost at the top, controls floating unattached above an undifferentiated list. Not "cramped" - empty, in the way a page with nothing holding it together is empty.

What it became

A rail and a column. The rail is sticky and carries the identity, the navigation with the current page marked, and - where they belong - the area filters, as a facet list with counts rather than a stack of pills that looked like form fields. The column is the same width on every page.

The reference section gets the same treatment: the docs tree in the rail, folders naming themselves and indenting what is inside them, the current page marked. A docs section whose only navigation is an index you have to go back to is a docs section nobody navigates.

Entry rows became one target rather than a title-sized one, with the number legible in a left gutter instead of buried in the meta line. Search stopped being an outlined box with a segmented control bolted beside it and became a filled field with an icon, and two words you can click.

None of those were ideas I could have had from the source. Each one was obvious within a second of looking at a picture.