wcook04.github.io

The page served at the root of https://wcook04.github.io/.

It is the top of a two-level public presence. This page introduces Will Cook and provides compact destinations. The Plectis site explains the project; its mathematics pages contain the complete eight-problem index and the paper catalogue. The root page does not repeat those introductions.

Front door	https://wcook04.github.io/: this repository
Plectis, the site	https://wcook04.github.io/plectis/ · docs · papers
Plectis, the repository	https://github.com/wcook04/plectis
Lean research repository	https://github.com/wcook04/plectis-erdos
Videos	1 min · 5 min · 29 min

The Plectis site is a separate GitHub Pages deployment: the gh-pages branch of wcook04/plectis, served under a path on this host. Nothing here builds it, and nothing in it builds this. The reading-map builder imports the source snapshot from the Plectis site; the return links are described under The pair.

It exists for two reasons.

The first is ordinary: it is a front door for anyone who trims a link back to the host, and a place to point at the published work.

The second is the reason it was written. Google resolves a site's favicon and its displayed site name per host, not per directory. Everything published here lives under the /plectis/ path, so before this page existed, the crawler fetched https://wcook04.github.io/ and got GitHub's own error page:

GET /             → 404, <title>Site not found · GitHub Pages</title>
GET /favicon.ico  → 404

Google attributed that page to the whole host. Search results for /plectis/ were shown with a generic globe and the site name "GitHub Pages documentation", and no amount of correct metadata inside /plectis/ could override it. The markup there was already right, and was simply never consulted.

/robots.txt was a 404 for the same reason. Crawlers only ever read robots.txt at the host root, so the copy at /plectis/robots.txt had never been fetched by anything, and the sitemap it declared had never been discovered by that route.

Contents

Path	Purpose
index.html	The root page. Served as-is; two generated regions are spliced into it by the scripts below.
404.html	Served by GitHub Pages for unmatched paths under the host root.
robots.txt	The host-root robots.txt. Declares the Plectis sitemap.
site.webmanifest	Root-scoped manifest.
favicon.ico, assets/	The Plectis mark and its rasters.
assets/plate-01*	Archived artwork retained locally; it is not part of the reading surface.
assets/previews/	Screenshots of each public destination, used as stills on the front door.
assets/og-frontier.svg / .png	The claim-bounded eight-problem social preview and its PNG delivery file.
data/glossary-terms.json	The governed public vocabulary, exported from the Plectis substrate: 486 terms with their reader cards, and the 2,354 surface forms that are safe to resolve on a bare word.
scripts/build_glossary_term_layer.py	Links every governed term the page actually uses and regenerates the preview payload. Re-runnable: it unwraps its own anchors before it writes.
scripts/check_frontier_surface.py	Static guard for compact destinations, the complete eight-problem source and keyboard access.
scripts/check_public_routes.py	Live smoke check for the public Plectis, paper, Lean, verification, Comparator, replay, citation, and updates hand-offs.

Refresh and check

The Plectis site is the primary project introduction. The root page also links directly to the mathematics index, both repositories, the papers and the films. The source snapshot and decorative previews retain all eight problems equally; the full questions and paper notes live on the mathematics pages. The JSON handoff embeds the published manuscripts and reading routes.

Refresh the source snapshot from a validated Plectis site build:

python3 scripts/build_absolute_frontier.py --site-root /path/to/ai_workflow/sites/microcosm --refresh-previews

The historical script and data filenames remain stable. The script reads the complete handoff and source-owned problem index, records their hashes, and rebuilds both the visible reading map and the problem previews. Do not edit data/absolute-frontier.json or its generated HTML regions by hand. Publication order is Plectis first, then this root page, so new paper links exist when the front door points at them.

Refresh the glossary from the same site build with the Plectis owner:

./repo-python tools/meta/dissemination/export_public_glossary_snapshot.py --out /path/to/wcook04.github.io/data/glossary-terms.json

Then, in this repository:

python3 scripts/build_glossary_term_layer.py
python3 scripts/build_absolute_frontier.py --check
python3 scripts/check_frontier_surface.py
python3 scripts/check_public_routes.py

The static check verifies equal problem coverage, paper and page destinations, source projection parity and glossary identifiers. The live route check verifies published destinations. Neither establishes mathematical truth or peer review.

Destination kinds

The route index colours each link by what it lands you on, so a reader knows before clicking whether a word takes them to a page, a repository, or a video.

Kind	Attribute	Colour	Mark
a page on this host	(none)	bone, lifting to the blue accent	none
a repository	data-to="repo"	--to-repo #e6b264	↗
a video	data-to="video"	--to-video #d47fac	↗
an account	data-to="profile"	inherits the colophon's --faint	↗

Neither colour is invented here. The gold is the value the Plectis stylesheet already uses for every link that leaves it (--link-ext, dark scheme); the rose is the magenta flare from the thread across the top of this page, lifted until it clears AA on the plum. That makes the thread the key to the list beneath it.

Two rules are load-bearing, and both are easy to break by accident:

• Set only data-to. The colour and the mark both hang off that one attribute, so a kind cannot be half-applied. Do not hand-type a ↗; the stylesheet generates it. The colophon used to carry typed ones and they drifted out of step with everything else.
• Colour is never the only signal. The kind column, the route name and the exit text each say the same thing in words: Watch / Videos / 29 min, Check / Eight-problem frontier / GitHub. A reader who sees no hue loses a shortcut, not a fact. Where the visible word does not name its own destination, an aria-label supplies the row it belongs to.

Destination stills

A name like "Plectis" does not say whether it is a website, a repository, or a word. The index now names the first row Plectis website, and each route carries a screenshot of the page that link actually opens.

• Below 1280px, the still sits under the row it belongs to.
• At 1280px and up, the stills occupy a quiet panel on the right. Hover or focus a route (or an exit inside it) and the panel swaps to that landing. Hovering a problem number switches the panel to its 7:9 question sheet.

The files in assets/previews/ are captures of the live URLs, not drawings. If a destination page changes enough that the still lies, recapture it:

# hero 1280w JPEG, thumb 640w JPEG, from a live screenshot
sips -Z 1280 -s format jpeg -s formatOptions 72 \
     --out assets/previews/<id>.jpg /tmp/<id>.png
sips -Z 640 -s format jpeg -s formatOptions 68 \
     --out assets/previews/<id>-640.jpg /tmp/<id>.png

Do not invent browser chrome around the still. The screenshot is the picture of the landing; the caption names it.

Social preview

The share card is a separate object from the destination stills. It has to communicate the mathematical first contact before a reader opens the page, so assets/og-frontier.svg is the source of truth for the eight-problem composition. index.html points Open Graph and Twitter at the 1200 by 630 PNG because social crawlers do not reliably render SVG.

The card names the open-source mathematics project and the eight problem subjects. These are topic labels, not a ranking of results or a claim that any problem has been solved. The checked results and remaining work live on the current problem pages.

After changing the SVG, regenerate and inspect the PNG before changing the metadata:

sips -s format png assets/og-frontier.svg --out assets/og-frontier.png
sips -g pixelWidth -g pixelHeight -g format assets/og-frontier.png

The expected delivery format is a 1200 by 630 PNG. Keep the og:image, og:image:width, og:image:height, og:image:alt, twitter:card, and twitter:image fields in index.html synchronized with that file.

The pair

This page and the Plectis site each name the other, and neither has a build step that could check it.

• Down: the Run row of the route index points at /plectis/.
• Up: the Plectis header carries Will Cook / Plectis beside its wordmark, and its colophon carries a Front door row reading Will Cook: public work.

Those labels preserve the cross-site return route: Will Cook is this page's <h1>, and public work describes the front door in the Plectis colophon. They must not be used as a paraphrase of the programme line, which is now Eight open Erdős problems. If you change either return label, change the Plectis header, its colophon, and PARENT_SITE_LABEL in that site's builder in the same pass.

Archived plate

The live front door is type on quiet plum ground. Destination stills sit beside the reading column on a wide viewport; they are captures of public pages, not decoration. assets/plate-01.jpg is former artwork: Wet Proof, plate 01, seed 5 at 2560x1600, made by assets/plate-01.lab.py. It is retained for provenance in an inert HTML template, not shown or loaded by the root front door. The programme index and portrait problem sheets now carry the visual hierarchy.

The ladder below is archival source material. Do not restore it to the reading surface as incidental polish: decoration must not compete with the programme.

# JPEG rungs. sips ships with macOS and writes progressive JPEG by default,
# which is what the lab wrote; formatOptions 75 is also its default, stated
# here so the files do not move if that default ever does.
for W in 960 1280; do
  sips -Z $W -s format jpeg -s formatOptions 75 \
       --out assets/plate-01-$W.jpg assets/plate-01.jpg
done

# AVIF rungs, via a lossless PNG so the resize is not encoded twice.
# avifenc comes from libavif (brew install libavif).
for W in 960 1280 1920 2560; do
  sips -s format png -Z $W --out /tmp/plate-$W.png assets/plate-01.jpg
  avifenc -q 66 -s 2 -y 444 -j all /tmp/plate-$W.png assets/plate-01-$W.avif
done

Rung	AVIF	JPEG
960w	29,252 B	79,662 B
1280w	44,641 B	129,922 B
1920w	72,397 B	none
2560w	123,399 B	246,660 B (plate-01.jpg)

Three of those choices are worth a sentence, since they are the ones a later pass would otherwise have to rediscover. -q 66 is where AVIF comes level with the JPEG rung on SSIM against the same reference, at about a third of its size; the dark plum ground is where loss would show first on this plate, so that is the region to look at if the quality is ever lowered. -y 444 keeps full chroma resolution, because the one hard edge in the picture is a thin saturated blue membrane against orange, and 4:2:0 blurs exactly that. The JPEG ladder stops at 1280 because a 1920 rung would encode larger than the 2560 original below it.

AVIF is offered and WebP is not. WebP came out slightly smaller here but measurably worse at the same size, and the browsers that read WebP but not AVIF are a narrow band that the JPEG already serves correctly. Two formats is the most this page should carry.

Any intentional return of the artwork requires a fresh visual and performance review; do not reinstate it as an eager decorative hero.

The mark

assets/favicon.svg is a copy, not a fork. The source of truth lives in the Plectis repository, where tools/brand/plectis_favicon.py renders the rasters and the pinned day/night siblings from it. If the mark changes there, recopy it here; do not edit it in place.

None of the icons in site.webmanifest is declared maskable, and none should be. A maskable icon is cropped to a circle inscribed in the middle 80% of the canvas, and the braid runs the full height of every raster we have. Declaring it maskable cuts the top and bottom strands off on Android. A real maskable variant would need its own padded render from the Plectis tool, not a flag here. Until that exists, the plain any purpose is the honest one: the launcher then supplies its own container rather than cutting into the mark.

Licence

The mark and page content are © Will Cook.