GxPlex

Evidence cards

One card per tracked entry, meant to be read away from this site: the status this record holds, the evidence state beside it, the day the document was last observed, and the address of the entry it is drawn from.

What embeddable means here

Three mechanisms could put a card on another page. Two are refused, and the refusal is not a preference — it is already what this site’s response headers say.

A frame. The other page would load this one inside itself, so every person reading that page would make a request to this origin, and a request carries an address and a browser string whether or not anything here writes them down. public/_headers declares frame-ancestors 'none' and X-Frame-Options: DENY on every path, so a frame does not render at all.

A hotlinked image. The same property, and quieter about it: an image looks inert on the page that carries it. The same header block declares Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy: same-origin, which is the instruction not to load this origin’s bytes into a document served from another one.

A copied fragment. Taken. A card is markup and inline style attributes and nothing else: no script, no stylesheet, no font file, no image, and no request of any kind back here. The site that carries a card serves it from its own bytes, and this record learns nothing about who read it.

The limits, which are the price of that mechanism

A copy does not update. It states what this record held on one day, for ever. So the day is printed on the face of every card rather than implied, and the one link on it goes to the entry, which is the only route to what the record holds now.

Nothing here can see a card once it is taken. That is the mechanism working, and it is also the cost: a card cannot be withdrawn, corrected or counted from this side. A correction reaches a copy only through the link.

Style attributes are stripped by many publishing tools. So no card carries a fact in its colour, its size or its position: with every attribute gone it says the same things in the same words.

A card carries states and days. Every address, every retained passage and every digest stays on the entry page. Publisher passages in particular are withheld: a quotation is asserted against the bytes it was read from by scripts/quotefidelity.py, which reads a declared list of quoting surfaces, and this is not one of them. Withholding is what this record does where a constraint and the evidence meet — never a quotation moved into an element the census cannot see.

A card is not a badge

A badge asserts a grade. Every card carries the same colours whatever it says, nothing on one is coloured, sized or ordered by what it states, and there is no mark, no tick and no rank anywhere on it. Two axes, a day and an address: the status this record holds, with whether a publisher surface was read for it; the evidence this record holds beside it; when the document was last observed here; and where the entry is. No card rates the document, and none rates the publisher.

The status value is printed as this record stores it — in-force rather than the reader’s spelling the entry page uses. One value, one spelling, on the surface that travels furthest from the page that could explain a second one.

The day a card can carry

A card states a last-observed day only where this record has retrieved the document the entry names and taken a digest of it. Where it has not, the card prints an em dash and the sentence saying which absence it is — an absent day and a day nobody looked for are opposite facts, and off-site an unexplained blank is read as the worse of the two. Listed in the order the states are tested, over all 132 tracked entries:

Every card

132 tracked entries, one card each, listed alphabetically by title: ordering by how recently an entry was observed would put the most recently read first and present that placement as a finding.

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