Entry 21

Links the generated nav could never know about

2026-09-21sitespec

Filescrates/cairns-site/src/icon.rscrates/cairns-core/src/config.rs

The rail's navigation was whatever cairns had made: entries, the reference, the open questions, the About page, the feed. A project site needs to point somewhere else too - the repository, the releases, a chat - and there was no way to say so.

[[link]]
label = "Repository"
url   = "https://github.com/Toyz/cairns"
icon  = "github"

They sit in their own group below the generated nav rather than mixed into it, because one set is pages this tool made and the other is everywhere else, and a reader can tell at a glance which is which.

Ten icons, inline

github, globe, book, code, download, rss, chat, mail, star, link, with the obvious aliases - docs for book, feed for rss, discord for chat.

They are inline SVG, for the same reason the page has no webfonts: an icon that needs a request is missing for the first second, and missing forever behind a proxy. Ten of them cost less than one request. The GitHub mark is the Octicons path, which is MIT licensed; the rest are drawn as plain geometry.

An unknown name renders no icon at all. That is right at build time - a link without a glyph still works, and a typo should not stop a site from building - but it is wrong to stay quiet about, so check reports it with the list of what is available:

cairns.toml: link "Releases" wants icon "downlod", which is not one of:
github, globe, book, code, download, rss, chat, mail, star, link

That pairing is the shape worth repeating: be forgiving in the renderer, strict in check. The site builds either way, and the person who made the typo finds out.