SchOS/docs/Website/README.md

The website

Three pages, two scripts, one stylesheet of its own, and the design system underneath. No build step, no dependencies, no framework — open index.html and it works, including from a file:// URL.

index.html    the front page
download.html get it, write it to a stick, or build it
docs.html     the documentation reader
app.css       this site's layout — and nothing else, see below
app.js        the boot log types, sections arrive, the bar takes a shadow
docs.js       the Markdown renderer and the doc index
niveus/       Niveus, vendored. The site links niveus/dist/niveus.css and
              niveus/niveus/niveus.js
Assets/       shift.svg (logo), uberblock.svg (SchFS),
              usb.svg (downloads), pride.svg

It is built on Niveus

Niveus is the interface language the project uses for everything with a screen — this site first, applications after it. The rule that makes it worth having is the one it enforces on this directory:

app.css contains no colour, shadow, radius, type size or duration. It is layout: where things sit, how wide they get, when they stack. Everything else is a token. A hex value in that file means the system is missing something, and the answer is to add it to Niveus rather than to work around it here.

What that replaced was a 21 KB style.css that transcribed include/theme.h by hand — palette, type scale, shadows, the lot. The intent was right and the mechanism was a copy: two files that had to be kept in step by remembering to. Now the whole identity is one declaration, in the <head> of each page:

:root { --nv-brand: #7C5CFF; }

That is SCH_ACCENT, the same violet the kernel draws with. Niveus derives the accent and its states, the link colour, the focus ring, the tint in the greys and how far the status colours lean — for light and dark both. The site still looks like the operating system, and now there is one number to keep true instead of forty.

The appearance follows the system, and remembers what you pick. Dark is the default because the OS is dark; the Light/Dark/Auto group in the bar is real, and app.js keeps the choice in localStorage. An inline script in each <head> reads it back before first paint, so the page never renders in one appearance and corrects itself in front of you.

PSOGM purple appears exactly once. #4B1D9A is on the crash-screen section and nowhere else, because ../branding/README.md says it means the machine stopped and that a colour used everywhere means nothing. It is spelled the way Niveus spells a subtree with its own colour — data-nv-brand with its own --nv-brand — so every role inside that section re-derives from it rather than being painted on. If it shows up in a second place, that is a bug in the page.

Updating the system

niveus/ here is a copy, so that this directory can be deployed on its own. The original lives in ../niveus/ and is where changes are made:

rm -rf docs/Website/niveus && cp -r docs/niveus docs/Website/niveus

The download page

download.html links to releases/schos.iso, a path relative to this directory. Nothing puts a file there — the ISO is 62 MB and does not belong in the repository — so the link is dead until a build is dropped next to the site:

make iso
mkdir -p docs/Website/releases && cp schos.iso docs/Website/releases/

The page is written so that this is the only thing that needs doing, and so that nothing on it is a promise the tree cannot keep. In particular the support table says one real machine, under test rather than listing hardware, because one Chromebox is the entire bare-metal record and a compatibility list would be fiction. When that changes, change the table; do not soften the wording.

The dd command is split across two lines on purpose. It was one long line first, and the card clipped it at conv= — a destructive command that can scroll half of itself out of view is a good way to take somebody's disk.

The docs reader

docs.html renders the Markdown in docs/ in the site's own theme, with the index down the left and a table of contents down the right. Links between documents are rewritten to stay inside the reader, so ../history/schfs.md in an architecture page navigates rather than downloads.

Both rails are .nv-nav--vertical, the current document is marked with aria-current="page" rather than a class of our own, and the renderer emits .nv-table and .nv-code — the reader is built from the same system as the rest of the site, so a change to Niveus reaches the documentation too.

The parser is about 150 lines in docs.js and handles what docs/ actually uses: headings, fenced code, tables, lists, quotes, rules and inline marks. A Markdown library would be larger than everything else here put together. Every document is escaped before a single tag is emitted — the only HTML that reaches the page is HTML docs.js wrote.

This one page needs a server. Browsers refuse fetch() on file:// for the same reason they refuse it cross-origin, so opening docs.html from a file gives a panel explaining that instead of the docs. Everything else works from a file. To read them locally:

cd /home/nexoniarz/Dokumenty/Projects/SchOS
python3 -m http.server 8000
# then http://localhost:8000/docs/Website/docs.html

Adding a document means adding one line to the DOCS array in docs.js. The reader will only load a path that appears there.

The two footer notes

Both pages carry two statements below the licence line, and both are meant to be read rather than skimmed past.

The first is the flag, below. The second is about AI, and it says the thing worth saying: the tool is not the measure. A project is good when the people building it understand what was built. That claim is deliberately made next to a link to history/, because that directory is where it can be checked — the bugs are written up in full, including the wrong turns and the measurements that disproved them. An explanation you can follow is the evidence; the byline is not.

The flag

Assets/pride.svg is in the top bar and in the footer, on every page, and it is not seasonal. Support with an end date is marketing; this is a project that belongs to whoever writes it. It is also deliberately small — the site is about an operating system, and the flag is a statement, not a subject.

The rules it follows

The typefaces are the ones the OS ships. Roboto for text and JetBrains Mono for the system voice — both already in ports/, both already in NOTICE. They are requested from the system rather than downloaded: a font file would be larger than the entire rest of the site.

The script is optional. If app.js fails to load the page is still complete and still readable. Everything it does is decoration, and it honours prefers-reduced-motion by doing none of it. niveus.js is optional in the same way — without it, state changes arrive instead of travelling.

The boot log is real. The lines in app.js are from an actual boot, not invented. The timer calibration line is there deliberately; see section 13 of ../history/kernel.md for what it cost.

Editing it

The numbers in the Numbers section are measured, not estimated, and they go stale. To refresh them:

find kernel include -name '*.c' -o -name '*.h' | xargs wc -l | tail -1
grep -c '^SYSCALL' kernel/sys/table.inc

The feature cards carry a badge — runs, in progress, or designed — and the badge is a promise. Anything marked runs is in the tree and works today. When that stops being true, change the badge rather than the wording.