Examples

Complete documents, not fragments. Each one is a real .md file in the repository, parsed and rendered for this site by the same packages the command line uses.

Each one is read with a theme stylesheet of its own, and none of them names a color or a width in its source. Everything categorical — a status chip, a tinted pipeline stage, a rail beside a timeline — is an author class that the theme interprets. That is what keeps a document portable: paste it anywhere and it still reads, because a renderer that has never seen those classes simply ignores them.

Start here

Showcase

Every construct at the size it would really be used, each carrying a tab that holds the exact source which produced it. It names no theme of its own, so it shows the vocabulary on whatever stylesheet renders it.

Construct tour · no theme · source

Seven complete documents

Every company, system and number in these is invented.

Analysis document

A long analysis whose source names no colors and no widths. The status chips, the layer rail and the tinted pipeline stage are all author classes that a theme stylesheet interprets, which is what keeps the document portable.

Analysis · theme dossier.css · source

Strategy memo

An argued memo in a newspaper register: a masthead, a captioned data table, marked sections in a two-lane grid, pull quotes and source citations.

Memo · theme memo.css · source

On-call runbook

The shortest and densest genre there is, read under time pressure, where the first screen has to be the answer. Triage steps that rank themselves, a symptom grid, procedures in tabs and an escalation table.

Runbook · theme runbook.css · source

Configuration reference

Mostly tables and code: resolution order, a table of keys per section, the same configuration in four formats, and a deprecation table. The one long example that names no theme, so it is read on the site's own stylesheet.

Reference · no theme · source

Architecture overview

The genre that is mostly diagrams. A system map, a state machine and a deployment topology, each an ASCII fence in the source rather than an image file kept in step by hand — and one fence deliberately left as code.

Architecture · theme tidewater.css · source

Incident review

A postmortem in the register of a printed report: an impact strip, a timeline on a rail, a factors table with a real caption, and an action list where the committed items mark themselves.

Postmortem · theme incident.css · source

Capacity review

The genre that argues from quantities: a fleet strip, four data tables that carry the whole case, and a distribution drawn as an ASCII plot. Written to find out what a document wants when the numbers are the argument.

Data readout · theme cistern.css · source