The Root Console — Roadmap

Where navcom.app/ (web/src/routes/+page.svelte) came from, what shipped, and what's next. Written down for the same reason build-order.md exists: so the trajectory survives between sessions instead of being re-derived or quietly dropped.

Pass 1 — the console exists

/ stopped being a redirect and became a real, interactive page: a search over the actual directory (Nav), the network's real derived state (Com), one link into the full Field Terminal. Reused the existing console — tokens.css/panel.css/screen.css, the Panel/Slot/Readout/Why components — rather than a fourth visual language. Budget measured and enforced (web/scripts/budget.mjs), not guessed.

Two defects found and fixed after shipping, both by describing what was actually on screen rather than trusting that it rendered: $lib/terminal/tokens.css never reset body { margin: 0 } (a bug every /terminal/* screen had silently carried), and "The Watchtower" had been used as product branding across three surfaces when the term is precise elsewhere in this project for a specific node's keypair — never the product's own name.

Pass 2 — the fusion made literal

Roster item 5 — "a single instrument where the callsign/area you're about to adopt and the place you'd actually go tonight are the same screen, same glance" — wasn't built in Pass 1 despite being recommended. The two panels sat side by side structurally but neither reacted to the other.

Fixed: a focusedRegion derived from whichever region a search result, a manual pick, or geolocation resolves to. When set, the Network panel switches from global figures to that region's own — records, freshest check, and how many are confirmedByPerson (reusing isSeeded() from @navcom/core, matching BROADCAST.measure's own published definition rather than a new metric) — plus a "help verify this" prompt reusing the exact copy already on the public record page, and a generic, hypothetical explainer of what holding watch would mean, using only vocabulary already in docs/watch/the-watch.md.

The one hazard, and how it was avoided. This project hard-refuses any directory or map tying a Watchtower to a region — docs/spec/bootstrap.spec.md: "a list of Watchtowers is a list of where operators are." Confirmed in code: no field anywhere relates the two. So the watch-explainer Slot never claims coverage, presence, or absence of a real Watchtower for the focused region — it explains the mechanic in the abstract and says plainly that nothing here discovers one. If a future pass touches this Slot, that boundary is the one thing not to move.

Also fixed in passing: corrections.svelte.ts has always accepted a correction with no callsign (verified_by: 'anonymous', no gate, no relay required) — docs/product/directory- schema.md names anonymous contribution as a first-class, designed-in choice. The UI copy on three pages said "goes out under your callsign" as though that were required. Corrected to say what's actually true either way.

Pass 4 — Real visual verification infrastructure — done

Node 22.23.2 was already installed via nvm on this machine the whole time — just not the shell default (node --version gave 18.16.0). nvm exec 22.23.2 npx playwright test runs clean, browsers were already cached. No system change, no new install, no default touched.

This immediately found a real bug static inspection never could: the white-margin fix from Pass 1 was incomplete. body { background: var(--t-ground) } compiled correctly and looked fixed in every grep — but --t-ground was declared inside .terminal, which is body's descendant, not its ancestor, so the variable was out of scope on body and silently resolved to nothing. Moved the token's declaration (default and low-signature override both) to :root, where both body and .terminal can actually see it. A new spec, e2e/root-console.spec.ts, runs against a real desktop Playwright project (added to playwright.config.ts, scoped to this one file — the console is the one screen meant to be seen on a desktop monitor first, unlike everything else here) and pins this regression, the bridge's actual side-by-side rendering, and the fusion mechanism end to end.

Real screenshots taken for the first time this session confirmed the fix and the bridge layout visually, not just structurally — and confirmed the fusion (Pass 2) actually looks right when a region is picked, not just that the right elements exist in the DOM.

Pass 3 — Accessibility and resilience audit — done

A keyboard-only tab walkthrough came back clean (input#lookup → select#region-pick → two Why summaries → the Field Terminal link, nothing trapped or unreachable). aria-live="polite" added to the Network panel, since Pass 2 made its content change on a region pick with nothing announcing it.

Then @axe-core/playwright got wired in — the first automated accessibility pass this codebase has ever had — and it found real, systemic defects, not edge cases:

• Every screen's content sat outside any landmark region. terminal/+layout.svelte had no <main>, and neither did this page. Fixed at the shared layout (benefits all 20 terminal screens, not just this one) and here.
• --t-faint failed WCAG AA everywhere it was used as actual text — every Slot key, every Readout sub-line, every Panel label, in both signature modes. tokens.css's own comment had called it "for labels only, never for reading," but WCAG doesn't carve out an exception for label text — this affected the five already-shipped panel-doctrine screens too, not just tonight's work. Raised via computed WCAG contrast math (not guessed) to the minimum that clears 4.5:1 against every background it actually sits on, in both modes, while keeping it the dimmest tier below --t-muted.
• The signature toggle's resting opacity: 0.75 failed contrast on its own, independent of the token fix — dimming via opacity washes out effective text contrast, and the button would have needed ~0.94+ to clear AA, which stops being meaningfully "recessed." Removed the opacity; position, size and tone already carry that intent without it.
• This page never read the signature preference at all — a real gap, not an axe finding: an operator who set low signature inside /terminal/ and later landed back on / silently lost it, because only terminal/+layout.svelte's onMount ever applied it. Wired in here too, plus the same reachable-everywhere toggle button.

Full suite re-verified after each fix: 456/456 unit tests, 296/296 e2e (including the new axe checks passing clean in both signature modes), nothing regressed by touching shared layout/token files.

Still open: a full screen-reader-software pass (VoiceOver/NVDA) — Playwright's accessibility tree and axe-core catch a great deal, but not everything a real assistive-tech session would.

Pass 5 — Operator self-published presence

Not yet started, and not lightly scoped. bootstrap.spec.md carves out one adjacent thing the Watchtower-directory refusal does not forbid: "a person choosing to be findable is a different thing... a published profile says 'I exist and you may write to me.' It does not say where anyone is." An operator's own opt-in Card/region disclosure could extend the fusion further than Pass 2's generic explainer — genuinely showing that someone has published presence near a searched region, never a Watchtower's coverage. Bigger, more sensitive, and needs its own explicit design pass and sign-off before building — nothing here should be read as pre-approval.

Pass 6 — Formal build-order tracking — done

docs/build-order.md now carries a B1–B7 table for the console, the same shape as the site's own A1–A6 — B1–B5 done, B6 (this pass) marked partial for the same reason it's partial here, B7 not started. It stops being invisible to the one document whose job is tracking trajectory.

Pass 7 — Multi-language — done

ConsoleRegionFigures now carries languages straight from the region's own manifest, and the focused region's "Records" slot shows it as a sub-line — "English, Spanish" rather than raw ISO codes, via the browser's own Intl.DisplayNames (no lookup table to maintain, and a code it doesn't recognise degrades honestly to the raw code rather than guessing — confirmed live: Navajo's nv doesn't resolve in this engine's data and falls back exactly as designed).