Proposal · visual enhancements across seven files
All sans. One paper. Five semantic hues mapped to section kinds — observations get teal, questions violet, answers amber, the brand stays indigo, pain reads rose. Typography stays system-style; weight contrast (300 / 500 / 700 / 800) replaces italics and serifs for emphasis. The page looks like the site, only louder where it matters.
The current pages are restrained in the right way — no SaaS bombast, no AI-tropes. What they're missing is taxonomy: every section reads with the same weight, so the eye has nothing to anchor on. The fix is structural, not stylistic.
Map five hues to five section kinds. Observations are teal, questions violet, answers amber, brand indigo, pain rose. The eye learns to skim by color in two scrolls.
Use 300 / 500 / 700 / 800 from the same family. The 300 sets context, the 800 lands the claim, and the 500 does everything between. No italics, no serifs.
Findings, answers, observations all collapse into colored cards. The findings page goes from a wall of text to a 2×3 grid you can read in 10 seconds.
Everything that follows in the four worked examples is built from the three cards below. Nothing else is needed. Spacing scales from the same 4-unit base; radii live at 8px (controls), 14px (cards), 999px (pills).
Section tags
Buttons
Stat block
Headline keeps its existing wording — "HTML you can keep." — but the emphasis word "keep" jumps to weight 800 and indigo while the rest sits at 300. The buried 5-block primitives list is promoted to a real anatomy panel; the manifest row is highlighted because it carries identity.
Open spec · since may 2026 · core v0.3.5
A discipline for sealed, self-contained HTML artifacts. One file. Twelve rules. Zero network — so the work survives the chat that produced it, the platform that hosted it, and the year it was made.
Five findings (O1–O5) get five different colored cards. The eye sees the structure of the research before reading a word. Stats row breaks out the four numbers that matter (12 rules, 5 blocks, 0 deps, 30+ capsules) — each in its taxonomy color.
Research note · v0.3.5 · sealed 2026 — 05 — 19
An open spec for sealed, self-contained HTML artifacts — and the empirical evidence that the contract holds across producers.
HTML is becoming the default output format for AI-assisted work.
File over app remains the durable preservation primitive.
Lineage is a more tractable problem than HTML diffs.
A live-editing layer is emerging upstream of the seal step.
Share links inside LLM platforms do not compose across platforms.
F1 — F25 in the research log. Same shape; tracked there to keep this page short.
Headline leads with the pain in rose — "die" is the punch — and the indigo "seal" lands the answer in the same line. The lifecycle becomes a real horizontal timeline with weighted nodes; the seal stage is twice the size of the others, indigo on a soft halo.
The pain · anti-context-loss
HTML Capsule sits between live editing and durable archive. Not a SaaS. Not a new file format. The contract that lets a useful artifact travel.
Karpathy · Thariq
Canvas · Artifacts · html-docs · Workplane
HTML Capsule
htmlbin · MinDev
llms.txt
The maintainer voice gets its own color (amber). Margin numerals on the left make the essay scannable without breaking the prose. A pull quote in amber tint marks the pivot — Steph Ango's "file over app" moment.
Field notes · spec authorship · journey
A first-person account of writing down a contract for HTML artifacts — and the year of copy-paste between AI tools that made one feel necessary.
Just want to give you my journey here with AI tools. I've been using all the chat systems — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini — and more recently the CLI and harness forms. For the longest time I was doing work in each, then copying and pasting in and out, trying to reliably get my info out of these systems into a format I could archive or share. It was a mess.
The share buttons exist, but something doesn't sit right. The chats get lost, or I'm not confident what version they show. Are they still updating? Will the link still work next month?
Around then I came across Steph Ango's File over App. The principle is right — your work should live in files you control, in formats that outlive any specific app. But my struggle with Obsidian was the same principle taken one step further than the essay intends.
So I stopped converting. I started keeping what the LLM gave me as HTML, then writing down what HTML would need to be to be trustworthy as an artifact.
End of memo · ready for your call
The remaining three files (index.html, landing-sketch.html, research-sketch.html) collapse naturally into the v2 mockups above. The big exploration page (index.html) gets the most lift: its observation / question / answer sections finally get the taxonomy they were already hinting at.