What everything else stands on — foundations, cores, modules, pillars. The load-bearing layer.
A structure that folds and unfolds in sections. Everything stays present; only what is opened is shown.
Where a thing can be found. Also to speak to someone directly — both are about reaching a particular one.
The hosted base this house keeps some earlier organisation in. A named tool rather than a concept.
What holds a thing in place against drift. An anchor does not stop motion; it bounds it.
The mobile platform this house ships to. A named system rather than a concept.
The declared surface by which one system may address another. A promise about what may be asked and what will come back.
Belonging to the decisions everything later must live inside. Of the choices that are expensive to change.
The decisions about structure that everything later must live inside. Architecture is what is expensive to change afterward.
The part of a system a user never sees but everything depends on. Where the real state lives.
A container for carrying, and a file that re-exports many others through one door. Both gather so a single handle serves.
The lowest part, on which the rest rests. Also the reference everything else is measured from.
A line of light, or a bearing timber. Both senses name something that spans a distance and holds.
A solid unit treated as one, and the stopping of passage. Both are about something whole standing in the way or in place.
Something placed at each end to hold what lies between. Bookends do nothing to the contents and keep them standing.
A support fixed to hold a thing steady, and a mark that binds a group together. Both hold what would otherwise spread.
A made way across a gap that would otherwise stop passage. A bridge belongs to neither side and serves both.
Links joined so that each holds the next. A chain is exactly as strong as its weakest link and no stronger.
Notes sounded as one — agreement made audible. Strings pressed together into a single name.
A surface where a system is spoken to in typed commands. The oldest interface, and still the most exact.
A bounded way something is carried through. A conduit holds nothing of its own.
Able to join what was separate. A connective carries nothing of its own; its whole worth is what it lets pass.
That which joins two things so they can reach each other. A connector holds no content of its own.
That which holds other things and gives them a bound. From holding-together, the same root as content and contentment.
The centre a thing cannot be without. Remove the core and what remains is no longer the same thing.
The Irish book-shrine — the ornamented case made for a book already sacred; it honors the text and never speaks over it. In the Sanctuary: the shell that wraps a living thing without ever being the thing. Irish joins the naming strata beside sruth, ceilidh, seanchaí, and éist.
A thing another thing cannot work without. Every dependency is a place where someone else's choices reach you.
Those that rely on another to work. Every dependent is a place a change reaches further than intended.
A computer meant to stay in one place, and the surface its interface imitates. Named for the furniture it replaced.
A made thing that does a particular work. Also a stratagem — both are contrivances aimed at an end.
A gathering place of voices in named rooms — where a community speaks and its words remain. The name is borrowed irony: the platform called discord is where accord is practiced.
The physical ground a system's memory actually rests on. What is not on disk does not survive the power going out.
A named tool for running things in isolated containers. A named tool rather than a concept.
A container that slides out of a larger body to show what it holds. Closed by default, opened on purpose.
A closed list that opens downward when asked. It hides its options until they are wanted, then shows them all at once.
Where a thing ends, and the connection between two nodes. Both are boundaries that carry meaning.
The named address a request is sent to. The far end of a line, where something is listening.
Something added that reaches further than the original. An extension belongs to what it extends.
The band at the foot of a thing. Where the closing marks live — provenance, terms, the small print that outlasts the body.
What everything else rests on. A foundation is judged only when something built on it fails.
A standing structure others build within. A framework decides the shape of what can be made in it.
The part of a system a person actually meets. Everything a user believes about a system, they learned here.
A controlled way through into somewhere else. A gateway is a boundary built for passage.
The named system for tracking every change to a body of work. It makes history a first-class thing rather than an afterthought.
The hosted service this house keeps its repositories on. A named tool rather than a concept.
The topmost or leading part. Also where a thing's identity and instructions are kept, before its body.
The band at the head of a thing. What is met first, and what declares the nature of everything beneath it.
The centre many things connect through. A hub holds no journey of its own and every journey passes it.
A made thing wielded by a hand toward an end — the tool taken up for a sitting rather than the machinery that runs on its own. An instrument is answerable to whoever holds it.
Made things through which a capacity is exercised. An instrument extends what a body or a mind can reach.
The declared surface where two things meet and may act on each other. An interface is a promise about what may be asked.
A named open platform for meeting by video. A named tool rather than a concept.
Kampyle (Greek καμπύλη: a curve, the feminine of καμπύλος "bent"). The bend of a motion, read as a number. A design system declares its curves once as CSS strings — linear, ease-in-out, cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1) — and the browser reads those for its own animations; this reads the same strings for the three places the browser is not animating: a pose derived on a stage, a frame of a film rendered with no document in the room, a value tweened where no browser stands at all. A timing string is read as four bezier numbers, the parameter is solved for x by forty steps of bisection with an early break at 1e-6, and the answer is read on y. The whole point is that a transition and its own motion under the same key bend THE SAME WAY, in both halves of a house about to be split in two. IT HOLDS NO TABLE: which curve a key means belongs to whoever declares it, and the one host surface is a single verb — give me the CSS string for this key — whose null answer is an honest one. AN UNKNOWN KEY IS A REFUSAL AS DATA, never a throw and never a silent straight line: four ways to fail, four plain sentences, no exception anywhere. An overshooting curve is TOLD APART rather than clamped, because a spring that anticipates below zero and overshoots above one is doing what a spring does, and flattening one quietly is how motion dies. Progress outside 0..1 is brought in rather than extrapolated. Zero imports, no DOM, no disk, no clock: a key and a number in, a number out, the same on every machine.
The centre — the point a thing turns about, and the still place that makes the turning possible. Sanskrit, केन्द्रम्. A centre holds without owning: this house's hub, needed by none of the realms it gathers.
The one shaped thing that opens a particular lock. What grants entry by fitting, not by force.
One level of a thing built in levels, each resting on the one below. Layers can be reasoned about separately, which is their whole use.
The clear image of a landscape — given a grouping and a number of sections, it lays out the provinces that fill a space. Displacement-class: the drawn graphic re-derives at any size without the truth changing; regions are discoverable, and clickable once discovered. Léarscáil, Irish: a careful image of the land.
The frame that holds threads still so they can be crossed into cloth. A loom makes weaving possible by holding tension.
A shown list of what may be chosen. A menu is a statement of the possible as much as an offer.
What sits between two parts and shapes what passes. Middleware is invisible and decides a great deal.
A surface that takes the whole attention until it is answered. It stops everything behind it on purpose.
Built of self-contained parts that can be joined or replaced. Modularity buys change at the cost of seams.
A self-contained part that can be joined to others. A module knows its own edges.
The means of moving through a structure and knowing where you stand in it. Direction offered rather than imposed.
Knowing where you are and how to reach where you are going. Navigation is orientation before it is movement.
A mesh that catches some things and lets others pass. Also short for network — both are things made of connections.
Things joined so that any can reach any other. A network's power is in its edges, not its nodes.
A point where many connections bind together. From the Latin for binding — a nexus is a knot rather than a place.
A point where connections meet. A node's meaning comes from its edges rather than from itself.
The runtime this house hosts local models on. A named tool rather than a concept.
A bounded surface set into a larger one. Also a small group convened to judge.
An upright that carries weight from above. Remove a pillar and what it held comes down.
A raised flat ground others stand on. What holds a thing up, and what shapes whatever gets built there.
An added part that extends a system without altering it. A plugin belongs to the host and is not of it.
A place ships come in, and a numbered doorway a system listens on. Also to carry a thing across to a new ground.
A doorway into somewhere else. A portal is defined by what it opens onto, not by its own shape.
A support set beneath a thing to keep it standing. First a stake under a growing vine.
A named toolkit for building interfaces. A named tool rather than a concept.
To send onward to somewhere other than where the request pointed. A redirect keeps an old address working.
The mail service this house sends through, and the act of sending again. A named tool, and a plain verb.
Routing: the table saying which of a gathering's streams reach which of its members, and which device carries them. Given the members with what each one publishes, each device's declared capacity, and which device is the hub, the routing is the whole map of what goes where. It answers what changes when one member joins, leaves or mutes, and what changes when the hub itself leaves. And it gives the difference from the table before it as a list of acts for the dress to perform, so a room is altered rather than rebuilt. The members with what each publishes, the capacities and the hub's identity in, the routing table and its difference from the last one out.
That which waits to be asked and answers when it is. Named for serving — it does not act on its own.
What carries the crossing thread back and forth through the warp. A shuttle makes the weave by going and returning.
A column set beside the main matter. Placed alongside rather than within, so it can be passed over without loss.
Reduced to the bare frame that gives shape. Of a thing showing structure without contents.
The bare frame that gives a body its shape. Also a placeholder showing where content will be before it arrives.
The load-bearing line a body is built around; what everything else attaches to.
Rendering a page on the server before sending it. It trades some interactivity for arriving already readable.
A fixed place where something is done or where passage stops. A station holds a position in a network.
Stereos (Greek στερεός: solid, three-dimensional, firm). The solid as pure number: a polyhedron held as vertices on the unit sphere and faces wound counter-clockwise seen from outside, with the winding made impossible to get wrong — every face whose normal points back toward the centre is reversed at construction, so a back-face cull is honest by shape rather than by careful typing. It holds the five Platonic solids (the dodecahedron derived by duality from the icosahedron, its pentagons ordered around each vertex by angle so they are drawn as pentagons and not as stars), the pentagonal trapezohedron a real ten-sided die actually is — its apex height solved from the condition that each kite be planar, never chosen by eye — the barrel a real three-, five- or seven-sided die is cut as, which declares itself unfair out loud because its side faces are equally likely while the shape is not face-transitive, and the disc, which is a coin and says so, its rim built and lit and never numbered. Beside the shapes stands the light that shows them: one house light so two surfaces can never disagree about where the sun is, an ambient floor generous enough that a face turned away reads as stone in shadow rather than as a hole, a perspective divide that hands back the depth it sorts by, painter's order, Lambertian shade and a Blinn-Phong highlight. The self-check RETURNS its complaints rather than throwing them, because a design system that breaks eighteen apps on import is worse than one that says what is wrong. No colour, no rendering, no DOM, no disk, no clock, zero imports: numbers in, numbers out.
Belonging to what holds a thing up. Of properties built into the arrangement rather than promised on top of it.
The arrangement that lets a thing hold together and bear load. What remains when the surface is removed.
The hosted database platform this house keeps its shared knowledge in. A named tool rather than a concept.
The framework this house builds its interfaces in. A named tool rather than a concept.
A flat portable surface for reading and writing. The oldest form of the word is a slab of clay.
Parallel surfaces sharing one frame, of which one shows at a time. What is hidden is not gone, only behind.
A named framework for building desktop applications from web technologies. A named tool rather than a concept.
The surface a system is spoken to in typed text. Also final — the same word for a doorway and for an ending.
The carrying of a thing from one place to another. Transport moves and does not transform.
A way carried through what would otherwise block it. A tunnel does not remove the obstacle; it passes under.
A string identifying a resource, whether or not it says how to reach it. It names before it locates.
An isolated environment holding one project's dependencies. Separation so that projects cannot break each other.
The hosting platform this house deploys to. A named tool rather than a concept.
A named framework for building interfaces. A named tool rather than a concept.
A network of linked things, and the thing a spider makes. Both hold by many small connections rather than one strong one.
An address one system gives another so it can be told when something happens. A standing invitation to be interrupted.
A channel held open so both sides may speak whenever they have something. Conversation rather than question and answer.
A small self-contained interface part doing one job. Named vaguely on purpose, since the point is that it is interchangeable.
A layer placed around something to hold or adapt it. It adds handling without changing the contents.