Colophon
How this site is made
An institution's craft should be inspectable. This page describes what this site is built from and what we have committed to keeping true about it.
Typography
Long-form text and display are set in Source Serif 4, a variable face designed for reading at text sizes on screen. Navigation, captions, and data labels are IBM Plex Sans; code and citation apparatus are IBM Plex Mono. Devanagari is set in IBM Plex Sans Devanagari — present as a first-class script rather than as transliteration.
All four are openly licensed and self-hosted. That was a deliberate trade: commercial faces would offer marginally more distinction today, at the cost of a perpetual licensing dependency. A document that must render in 2076 cannot rest on a licence renewal. Distinction is carried by the system — the measure, the scale, the ascent line, the restraint — rather than by the font files.
The site is designed to remain fully itself with zero webfonts loaded. If the font files fail, the fallback stack takes over and nothing breaks.
The stack
Built with Astro and served as static HTML. There is no client-side framework, and reading pages ship essentially no JavaScript — the two exceptions are the colour-mode toggle and the reading-progress line, both of which degrade to nothing.
Content lives as plain Markdown files with YAML front-matter, in version control. This is the load-bearing decision: the framework, the host, and the design are replaceable renderers of that content. Plain text in version control is the only content store with a fifty-year track record, and every other choice here was made so it could be abandoned without touching the substance.
Performance
The build enforces a budget rather than aspiring to one: a failing budget fails the build. Reading pages are capped well under 150KB excluding fonts, and fonts are capped in total. Diagrams are SVG with CSS-variable fills — one artwork rendering correctly in both colour modes.
Accessibility
The commitment is WCAG 2.2 AA as a floor, with body-text contrast held to the stricter AAA threshold in both modes, because reading is the product. Everything is keyboard operable with a designed focus state. Reduced motion is the designed baseline and motion is added on top, rather than being stripped off as an afterthought.
An institution claiming to expand civilization's capability cannot publish a site that excludes part of it. Audit results will be noted here as they are carried out.
Analytics and privacy
No third-party advertising trackers, ever — this is a standing commitment rather than a current configuration. No cookies for tracking, no chat widget, no session recording, no fingerprinting. What we measure is deliberately blunt: whether readers come back.
URLs are permanent
A published URL on this domain is maintained indefinitely. If a page moves, the old address redirects; it does not break. Slugs are semantic and dateless so they survive revision. A 404 here is treated as a defect rather than a shrug — if you find one, tell us and we will fix it.
Preservation
A full static snapshot is archived quarterly to storage we control, and the repository is mirrored to two independent hosts. Once a year, the year's essays, letters, and papers are compiled and physically printed — one bound copy, kept. That last practice is partly ritual and partly the recognition that print is the only backup format with a five-hundred-year record.
Corrections
Errors are corrected visibly and dated, never quietly. A public correction is a trust deposit, not a wound.