One card per systems page, titled with the manufacturer and listing its consoles as far as three lines hold. Rendered once and committed like the platform cards.
Shown at 40 px, the 96 px PNG logos were 136 KiB of the home page. WebP at twice the display size is 27 KiB for the twelve raster marks. SVG stays as each project publishes it.
Diagram text reads at 14 px in the column, boxes take the height of their lines, paths are mono on a line of their own. One setup count for every page. Wiki pages expand install commands into system tabs, an options table read from install.py, and keep example hashes out of search.
generate_site.py writes the Starlight project in website/ and nothing
else: mkdocs.yml, the MkDocs hooks, theme overrides and stylesheet go,
and the wiki is written in Starlight's syntax. Both workflows set up
Node with the official actions/setup-node pinned by commit, run npm ci
from the committed lockfile, build with the strict link validator and
check the result with validate_site.py.
The search weighs a page by what it answers: Start here pages first,
a system page's cards and file names before a guide citing them, deep
guides, launchers, aliases and frozen copies after. Status badges,
hash blocks and the export change lists leave the index. The ranking
sits at the centre of a range where the 13 queries of search_gate.py
all answer, in the search box itself.
839 pages, every URL and 45,611 ids match the MkDocs build. The tests
read the Starlight content and syntax.
A manufacturer page over 500 KB of Markdown becomes a summary: its
largest consoles move to pages of their own, cut into parts when one
console is still too large, and every console keeps its heading there.
MAME's 1,564 cards move to four pages, its page keeping a row per entry
with the card's old anchor. RetroDECK's arcade list gets its own page.
site.js follows a moved card by content or by its row.
The largest page drops from 10.5 MB to 0.88 MB. Emulator groups of the
navigation open by initial (65 KB to 41 KB before the content). File
cards are level 3 under a level 2, and the hook keeps the table of
contents of card pages to level 2: platform pages no longer list every
system id. Key/value cards name their columns. The sweep runs before
the decoration, which kept every page no generator wrote any more.
Hashes, link lists, install commands, member tables and long reference
tables leave the site search: the index drops from 21.0 MB (4.88 MB
gzip) to 6.8 MB (1.33 MB gzip). Names and prose stay searchable.
files/?hash= takes a SHA1, MD5, CRC32 or SHA256 and reads one shard of
api/v1/lookup/ (about 22 KB gzip, was 675 KB) listing the collection
card, the platforms that declare the value and the profiles that check
it. files/?sha1= still opens the card, and a sha1- anchor missing from
a page is looked up there, so a card can move between pages.
Excluded blocks are section elements: the search plugin compares
elements by tag, so a div ended at the first nested div.
Wrapped buttons get a row gap, the copy button fits a one-line code block, tables line up with the text, four counters share one row, the sticky sidebar label gets a rule, and a phone table no longer squeezes its first column to one letter per line.
The header logo was a 256 px compressed raster whose navy chip vanished on the indigo bar. The chip is now an SVG, white with the glyph cut out, and the favicon set (SVG, 32 px and an opaque 180 px touch icon) comes from scripts/make_site_icons.py.
scripts/sitediagrams.py writes the explainer, install flow, verification modes, MinUI card, pipeline and data layer diagrams as inline SVG from the registry, the platform files, the install manifests and the pipeline step list. A page asks for one with an image comment, which the decoration pass resolves. The two mermaid diagrams of the architecture page are replaced, so no page loads mermaid from unpkg.
Platform logos and system icons are copied once by fetch_site_images.py with their source and owner recorded, and the build rewrites the remote links to the copies. validate_site refuses an image from another host. Three registry logos named a personal avatar instead of the project's (RomM, ROCKNIX, MiSTer FPGA) and MyMinUI's was a GitHub identicon, now dropped.
One 1200x630 sharing card per section, a 404 page with search and the two entry pages, and a list of screenshots that need a real device.
Header keeps the brand indigo in dark mode, buttons and inline code in links take the link colour, badges get darker backgrounds: axe reports no contrast failure left on nine pages in both schemes (617 nodes before). Admonitions keep one meaning per colour. On a phone, tables with a download button stack one block per row, other tables hold their first column, and commands wrap. Card grid, numbered steps, level label, terminal panel and path chip classes for the generated pages.
The search splits a page at its headings. Emulator cards were titled in
bold and platform systems folded into blocks under one heading, so a
pasted hash opened the top of a page or the systems overview of a
100-block platform page. Each file card is now a level 4 heading kept
out of the table of contents, and each platform system a heading.
Card lines that list other pages (platforms, packs, source citations,
collection paths) leave the search index: 24.7 MB down to 18.1 MB, the
names, hashes and notes still searchable.
No gradient banner, no coloured stripes or dots beside cards, no lifting cards, pill badges or small-caps headers. File blocks are separated by a rule, tables keep the theme's own size, and headings no longer repeat the site name the header bar already shows. Classes nothing emits were removed.
Links to this site get shared on Discord, Reddit and forums, where a
page with no Open Graph tags renders as a grey rectangle. The pages
already carry a per-page title and description, so a theme override
fills the tags from those; mkdocs-material would otherwise only emit
them through its social plugin, which pulls in Pillow and CairoSVG to
render a preview image these pages do not need.
The metadata behind the verifier, the pack builder and the site is now
served as static files: a versioned JSON API, CSV extracts, a SQLite
snapshot, and a catalog carrying a SHA-256 for each artifact.
The gaps dataset covers both layers behind a layer column. It previously
held one row, the single platform-verification anomaly, while the page
offering it as a download led with the emulator-level count.
source_ref renders as a permalink pinned to the revision the profile
cites. When a profile declares two repositories, a path that belongs to
neither by name is left as plain code: a citation without a link still
names the file and the lines, a link to the wrong repository does not.
The table filter, focus outlines and tap targets are progressive
enhancement; the pages work without them.
Abdessamad Derraz