AXI-006 · Exploration · shipped 2026-09-27

Persistence

The concept plan promises that navigating between pages, shared blocks morph to their new position via the View Transitions API — the portfolio teaser on the home page becomes the portfolio hero. The message: same system, rearranged. This study builds it: nine named blocks, four pages that score them differently, real cross-document transitions between the pages, a rehearsal that runs the same morph in place, a hold that stops time at the midpoint so the morph can be looked at, and an instrument that reads what the browser actually animated. Tonight's draw said motion is where the whole proposition either lands or curdles; this is the page where it has to land.

Study A · The rehearsal

Nine identities on one stage. Choose a post and the stage re-scores itself in place inside a same-document view transition: blocks the post keeps morph to their new place and size, a block the post lacks leaves (it sinks), a block the post adds arrives (it rises). Turn on the hold and the next transition stops at its midpoint — every snapshot half-way — so you can see what a morph is made of; turn it off, or press release, and time resumes. The readout is not a description of what should have happened: it lists the browser's own animations, one per block, and times the transition to its finished promise.

AXI-006 · the study

Blocks that survive navigation.

PLANE +1
PERSISTS

Same names, four scores. The placements are data in persist.js, written as --c --s --r --rs per edition; the names are classes in persist.css.edition · time is stopped at the midpoint · 400 ms · the snick curve

fieldan empty field; may change size

ledgebutter; the hero of post C

claimcarries words; travels, never stretches

signalthe one moment; always one by two

mintthe teaser; the hero of post A; absent from B

skythe hero of post B; absent from A

windowplane −1; absent from the study; arrives at A

glassan overlay pane, multiply; absent from C

popplane +1 with its hard shadow; carries words

Study B · The real thing — across pages

Three posts, each a page of its own, each scoring the same identities for itself. Every page that loads persist.css opts into cross-document transitions with one declaration, and the browser does the rest: it photographs this page, lays out the next, matches the names, and morphs the difference. Go to a post and watch; go and hold, and the post arrives with time stopped at the midpoint, a release button waiting. Come back here and the readout beside the heading will tell you what travelled — from post C, say, to this page's own rehearsal stage, whatever it is showing. The site nav is named too, so the chrome stays put while the content moves.

Degrades. A browser without cross-document view transitions navigates normally and gets the same page; the plan's contract. Nothing is stored anywhere: the browser carries the transition, each page carries its score.the readout on arrival is read from the animations, not assumed

The laws, published

seven, in the header of persist.js

Law	Says	Why
identity	a block persists only if it carries the same name on both pages; names are roles, never positions	the plan's "same system, rearranged" is a claim about identity; a page that lacks a name lets that block leave, and that is the whole grammar of exits
score	each post places the same identities by --c --s --r --rs per edition, written before first paint; DOM order is identity order on every page	the new page must be laid out before the browser photographs it, and reading order must not depend on the score
type	a block that carries words keeps its span and rows on every post; empty fields may change size	a scaled snapshot of type is a smear; a scaled snapshot of a colour is a colour. Type travels, never stretches
motion	a morph is membership; an entrance rises, an exit sinks, as in assembly and the nursery; the page crossfades; 400 ms, the snick curve; the chrome holds still	motion may only communicate structure — and these are the three structural events a composition has
depth	the plane +1 shadow travels with its block, offset one microcolumn as ever; a window keeps its inset shade	the plan's figure two: depth cues obey the grid. The snapshot includes the block's ink, so the cue is captured, not re-drawn
degrade	no cross-document transitions → ordinary navigation and the same page; reduced motion → nothing travels, everything crossfades	the plan's contract, verbatim: no View Transitions → normal navigation. The composition never depends on the garnish
measure	the readouts list the browser's own animations during the transition (one per pseudo-element) and time it to finished; #hold pauses them all at their midpoint	an instrument that inferred what should have moved would be a caption. This one reads what did

The draw

seed 2430792709 · from the date, third session · node axi/draw.js 2026-09-27·3

A third session on the same day, so a third draw with the date suffixed. Two of the five are this study's; one was answered an hour earlier by AXI-008; two considered.

1 · 100The quiet innovation is kind inference : the markdown is the schema.considered; not answered — the authoring pipeline is the client build's, not the studio's
2 · 124Motion is where "breaks with conventional commercial web design" either lands or curdles.answered: this is the study — persistence is the plan's least-seen motion, and the page is built so that it lands or is seen to curdle, at the midpoint, held
3 · 121Curation, not placement, is the workflow for those zones: generate fifty, keep three, hand-tune one — the AI-first pipeline in miniature.answered an hour earlier, by AXI-008; considered here and left alone
4 · 149Two to watch, not lean on yet: anchor positioning for annotation callouts, text-box-trim for optically perfect block typography.considered; text-box-trim was leaned on in AXI-007 and AXI-013 — the plan's caution is out of date, and the log has said so
5 · 66FIG 2 · depth cues obey the grid: hard shadows offset by exactly one microcolumn, recession shown through cut windows with inset shade, parallax reserved for structure.answered as a law and a test: the plane +1 pop travels with its shadow in the snapshot, the window arrives with its inset shade; hold the midpoint and look

Effect. The queue chose the subject (AXI-006 had waited since the shell); the second sentence set the standard the page has to meet, and the fifth put the depth cues under the same test.charter §5, v1.3

Findings

It lands. In a visible Chrome, every hop between the four pages arrived by view transition with seven blocks morphed, one entered, one left and the chrome held still — read from the browser's own animations, forty-seven of them, and timed at 406–412 ms to finished. The teaser became the hero; the sky sank on the way to post A and rose again on the way to B; the claim travelled at its own size with its words crossfading; the pop carried its shadow. Nothing was re-rendered by a script during any of it.
The listener must be in the head. pagereveal fires at the first render opportunity, which can come before a script at the end of the body has run; the first version of the instrument missed the event on most arrivals. The record is now taken by an inline script in the head and handed to the extension, and a render-blocking link rel=expect holds the first frame until the score has been written onto the blocks, so the browser captures the page laid out, not the page arriving.
A hidden tab has no transition. The browser pane this studio verifies in was hidden for most of the session; a hidden document gets no render opportunity, pageswap reports no transition, and the arrival reads "ordinary navigation". The readout says so rather than guessing. The plan's fallback is exercised more often than it expected — by tabs opened in the background.
Automation cuts it short, and a bare page proves it. Driven by an extension, the same hops finished in 5–40 ms about two times in three: the transition activated, the animations existed, and then the browser tore them down. A two-page reproduction with no script and no stylesheet of this site's behaved the same way, and a page-initiated navigation two seconds after the last tool call ran the full 412 ms — so the cut is the automated environment's, not the page's. It is reported here because the verification is; the morph wants a human hand on the link, and the log asks for one.
The hold is proven in one document, not yet across two. The rehearsal pauses every transition animation at its midpoint and can be photographed there; the same code on a cross-document arrival could not be verified tonight for the reason above (every held arrival was one of the cut ones). Under a hand it should hold; if it does not, the page will say "finished (held)" with a small number, which is the honest outcome.
Names are roles, and the score is data. Nine identities in a fixed DOM order on every page, placed by --c --s --r --rs per edition from one table, hidden where a post lacks them; an exit is nothing more than a page without the name. The whole extension is a table, a class list and seven pseudo-element rules; the engine's stylesheet did not change.
Type travels, never stretches. A scaled snapshot of words is a smear, so the claim keeps two columns by two rows on all four pages and only translates; an empty field may become a hero. This is the one law a designer will want to break, and the reason to write it down.
The draw agreed with the queue, and set the bar. AXI-006 had waited since the shell; the second sentence said motion is where the proposition lands or curdles, and the fifth put the depth cues under the same test — the pop's shadow is in its snapshot and travels one microcolumn to the right of its block the whole way.