Entry 16

A field carried all the way through and shown nowhere

2026-09-20sitespec

Filescrates/cairns-site/src/html.rs

files is in the spec as "paths the entry is about". cairns new --files writes it, the parser reads it, log.json exports it, and every one of this log's entries has one. The site rendered it nowhere at all.

It had passed through the entire pipeline without ever arriving anywhere a reader could see it, which is why nothing caught it: there is no test for "appears on the page", and the field was present at every point anyone checked.

It sits under the dateline now, each path linked into the repository through the same resolution the prose uses - so an entry about a bug in html.rs is one click from html.rs.

The general shape is worth naming, because this project has hit it twice today: a field can be parsed, validated, exported and still be dead, and none of parsing, validating or exporting will tell you. The other was the traffic-light status badge, which rendered but looked like a different website. Both needed somebody to look at the page.