V10 — The Ledger

Thesis: radical transparency as layout — an open account book where every factual claim carries a numbered entry in a visible evidence margin, unverifiable lines are struck through as "cannot claim yet," and the footer is a public changelog. Quote-or-abstain, the branch's deepest principle, turned into architecture. To our knowledge no consulting website anywhere does this.

One of ten competing design variants; content identical across all ten (see website/variants/content.md).

Build: hand-written static HTML/CSS, one stylesheet, no framework, no images (~94 KB of self-hosted woff2 is the entire asset budget). The margin is CSS grid; the claim-to-entry hover is eight lines of optional JS.

To extend: every new page opens a new account. Our Work becomes the ledger's proudest section — each case a set of postings with client-consented evidence entries; Impact is the day the struck rows get un-struck, which is itself a story worth a changelog entry. Rules: no factual sentence ships without an entry or a strike; entry numbers never get reused; the changelog is append-only.

Deploy: consolidated Cloudflare Pages tree via tools/deploy-cf.ps1.

v1.2 — Critic round 2. Verdict: "3rd of ten — the most distinctive concept in the field, and Account 02 is the best-crafted block across the variants, but the site abandons its own thesis below the fold on desktop and completely on mobile." Top notes, all actioned: the evidence margin now follows the reader as a ledger line — it was already sticky, but a scroll-spy now lights the entries the current account cites and dims the rest to 0.4, so the margin reads as the line for where you are (JS-flagged; without JS every entry stays lit); mobile no longer strands citations in a bottom slab — a superscript now expands its entry inline beneath its own paragraph (tap again to close), and the bottom margin is relabelled the "all entries" appendix; the margin was set least readably of anything on the site — body raised to 0.78rem in ink, with green kept strictly for the E-label and the verified/pending chips so the colour keeps meaning "checked"; the reserved portrait frames and the duplicate name table became one thing — a 4×2 grid where each frame carries its own name and office, so the seat and the person it's held for are the same object, and the separate register table is gone; the hero was staged — up to 4rem/1.05, balanced so "receipts," never orphans, and its measles of six superscripts cut to two at clause-ends (E1, E4); the marker↔entry bond is now drawn — hovering or focusing a ref lights its margin entry with a green left-rule and warmer paper, and hovering the entry lights its refs, 120ms, no movement; Account 02's struck rows read absence not a dash — the value column shows a quiet ∅; and on the client page the changelog was rebuilt to the true ledger grid (it had collapsed into a 60px sliver) and the intake form set to full measure with name and organisation sharing one row. Decision logged: the scroll-spy dims rather than reorders — reordering the entries as you scroll would fight the stable numbering the whole conceit depends on.

v1.1 — Critic round 1. Verdict: "top-three on concept and voice — the struck rows, evidence chips, and account numbering are a fingerprint." Top notes, all actioned: the two-column account rows collided on mobile (now stacked with explicit grid rows; the balance table stacks per row too); the evidence margin abandoned its claims down-page (entries now carry ↩ back-links to the accounts that cite them — the sticky rail does travel in a live browser, but adjacency is now declared both ways); the hero gained a struck specimen line so the signature device is visible at first paint, and the headline widow hand-broken; eight reserved portrait frames warm the register without faking a face; mono-caps hierarchy split (table headers lowercased and dimmed); refs shrunk with a dotted hover cue; the cryptic "n"/"…" glyphs replaced with em dashes; nav made canonical across all three pages (Colophon included); the changelog restyled as true ledger entries (CL.01…, version chips). Decision logged: terracotta stays exclusively forensic — warmth comes from the reserved frames, not from diluting the semantic palette.

v1.0 — initial construction. Built from the shared content spec with all accumulated lessons from V1–V6 applied: zero entrance motion by thesis, no card walls, plain controls, no cross-page duplication (the client page is its own account with its own F-series entries), semantic color only.