From riskmandate.ai, the page as fetched on 2026-09-25 · open the live page ↗Everything on this sheet is the source site's own text; the newsroom's chrome is outside it.

How riskmandate.ai actually works

Rendered from docs/how-the-website-works.md in the repository. The text below is that file. Source: https://riskmandate.ai/admin/briefs/how-the-website-works/↗ · noindex · written by scripts/site/build-admin.mjs

How a page is put together, what happens when the browser loads one, and where each thing lives. Current as of v1.0.0; see the addendum below for what has been added since, and .claude/onboarding/01-map.md for the current map.

Addendum, v1.17.0. The mechanics below still hold. Since v1.0.0 the site has gained, each with its own script under scripts/site/ and a --check in CI: the Agent Behaviour Policy vaults (build-abp-vault.mjs, one directory per vault under site/vaults/, derived from four input files; the renderer once in site/vaults/_app/, every vault carrying a loader — see docs/briefs/architecture__vaults-in-vaults-for-behaviour-policies.md), the library page and one page per vault (build-abp-pages.mjs, from site/vaults/index.json), dated PDF editions of every Lab page (render-lab-pdfs.mjs, registered by digest in site/lab-editions.json), the GitHub link and licence line on every page (add-licence-chrome.mjs), the brief register (site/briefs-register.json, checked by digest), the pages.json page list with unlisted, private and link entries, and the admin console under site/admin/ (build-admin.mjs, v1.23.0; admin.html redirects to it) as the index of all of it. The page counts and the test list in the body are the v1.0.0 figures; npm run check runs everything CI runs today.

The one-paragraph version

site/ is the website. GitHub Pages serves that directory byte for byte — there is no build step, no framework, no bundler and no server. Each page is a single self-contained HTML document: its own <style>, its own <script>, its own data inlined at the top. Open one with file:// and it renders. Navigation between pages is <a href>; the shared header is drawn by one small custom element that every page carries a copy of. Four pages fetch something at runtime, and only from the same origin.

Before v1.0.0 all of this lived in an SG/Vault and was served through a host <iframe>. site/versions/1.0.0.md ↗ is the record of that change.

1. What the browser does

GET https://riskmandate.ai/plug.html
  └─ Pages serves site/plug.html — one document, ~58KB, nothing else required
       <style>   the whole page's CSS, tokens first
       <body>    the markup, including <rm-menu> and any page components
       <script>  one IIFE: RM.data (inlined), then each component, then boot

  1. custom elements self-register as the script runs
  2. boot.js calls RM.components.nav.wire(document)
  3. <rm-menu> renders the header from RM.data.pages  → <a href> per page
  4. page components render their own content

No page waits on anything to become readable: the prose is in the document the server sent. Components add the interactive parts on top.

2. The anatomy of a page

Every page is the same five things in the same order.

	What	Why it is inline
`<head>`	title, description, canonical URL, Open Graph, favicon, and a `<link rel="alternate">` to the page's markdown twin	crawlers and link unfurls read the document, not a manifest
`<style>`	design tokens on `:root`, then the shared header rules, then this page's own	one request per page; a page can't render half-styled
`<body>`	`<header class="top">` with `<rm-menu>` and the version link, the content, the footer	—
`<script>`	`RM.data` — this page's name and the site's page list, as JSON	the menu is identical everywhere and needs no fetch
	the components, then `boot.js`	plain concatenation, source order matters

Design tokens

Declared on :root in every page, identical everywhere:

--bg #F7F6F2   --bg2 #EFEDE7   --card #FFFFFF  --ink #0D0D0C   --canvas #0A0A09
--text #1A1917 --muted #4A4845 --faint #8A8780 --border #E2DFD8
--green #1A7F5A --green-2 #22c55e --greenBg #EBF5F0
--gold #B45309 --red #C0392B --blue #1D4ED8
--wrap 1000px  --r 10px  --r-sm 8px

Colours in a page are tokens. A literal hex outside :root is a bug, except inside the brand SVG, which is a fixed artwork.

3. The components

Four are on every page. The rest are on the one or two pages that need them.

On all 24 pages

components/dom.js — el() builds an element with attributes and children; text always goes in through textContent. renderMarkdownInto() turns markdown tokens into DOM nodes, never an HTML string, so fetched content cannot inject markup. Links are scheme-checked before they become <a href>.
components/nav.js — the two behaviours that are not links: [data-to] scrolls in-page, [data-demo] opens a pre-filled mailto. It also injects the mobile drawer, so every page gets a working menu under 880px from one file.
components/menu.js — <rm-menu>. Renders the header from RM.data.pages: an <a> per page, contiguous pages sharing a group collapsing into a dropdown. The group header is the only <button> in the menu, because it opens a panel rather than going anywhere.
boot.js — nav.wire(document), on DOMContentLoaded.

Where needed

Component	Pages	What it does
`registry`, `vault-demos`, `vault-page`	the 6 demo pages + `demos.html`	the demo catalogue and the embed that opens each demo's own SG/Vault with its own public read key
`risk-queue`, `data`	`index`, `acceptance`, `grant-gap`	the acceptance-queue figure
`io`	`feedback`, `library`, `versions`	`RM.services.siteIo` — a same-origin `fetch`, and the only runtime IO in the site
`markdown`, `version`, `versions`	`versions`	the version record
`library`, `media`	`library`	articles from `assets/library/library.json`, talks and the deck from `assets/media/media.json`
`insurability`	`index`	the Insurability Index card
`plug-profile`, `state-grid`, `scenarios`, `statics`, `ramm-figure`, `ramm-pyramid`, `brand`, `options`, `loop`, `prompt`, `window-picker`	one page each	that page's figure or interaction

Components never use innerHTML. Everything is built with dom.el and textContent — which is what makes it safe to render a markdown file that was fetched at runtime.

4. The four pages that fetch

Everything else is complete in the document. These four are not, and each has a reason:

library.html — articles and their artwork come from assets/library/, so the copy can change without touching the page. Images load lazily as cards scroll in.
versions.html — reads versions/index.json, then each release's notes on demand. Inlining 36 notes would make a 100KB page whose contents you could only read by reading the page; this way every entry links to the bytes it was rendered from.
feedback.html — its interview prompt lives in assets/.
/scenarios/ — the pilot. Unlike the rest of the site it reads an SG/Vault (dm42qcaw) directly in the browser, decrypting with Web Crypto. That needs a secure context, which is why local development uses localhost and not 127.0.0.1. See docs/briefs/implementation__scenarios-pilot.md.

The live demos also load vaults — but in their own <iframe>, from dev.vault.sgraph.ai, each with its own published read key. Those keys are public by design. No write credential of any kind belongs in site/, and a test asserts none is there.

5. Versions

The number in the header is the site version. It links to versions.html, which renders versions/index.json plus one markdown note per release — 36 of them, 35 carried over from the vault and flagged reconstructed because the builds they describe are not in this repository.

Cutting a release is deliberate:

node scripts/site/release.mjs 1.0.1 "What changed, in a line"
# writes site/versions/1.0.1.md, updates index.json, restamps every page's
# version chip, and updates riskmandate_ai/version

Then write the notes, commit, push. CI checks the three places agree, tags that commit v1.0.1, and deploys. Nothing increments the version on your behalf — a release is a note somebody wrote, and the tag is what lets versions/index.json name the commit each release was built from.

6. Generated files

node scripts/site/generate.mjs rebuilds everything in site/ that is derived from something else:

File	Derived from
`<page>.md`	that page's prose. Anything a component renders at runtime is in the page, not the twin.
`sitemap.xml`, `404.html`	the page list in `index.html`
`llms.txt`	the page list plus each page's title and description
`robots.txt`	fixed
`versions.md`	`versions/index.json`

They are committed, not built at deploy time — site/ is served exactly as it is in the repository. generate.mjs --check fails if any of them is stale, and runs as a CI gate, so a page cannot ship with a twin that contradicts it.

7. The pipeline

.github/workflows/ci-pipeline.yml, on push to qa/dev/main or manual dispatch:

check          node --test tests/site/*.mjs
               node scripts/site/generate.mjs --check
   ↓
tag            tag this commit v<versions/index.json:latest>, if not already tagged
   ↓
build          touch site/.nojekyll, upload site/ as the Pages artifact
   ↓
deploy         actions/deploy-pages

The deploy always follows the tag, so the live site never claims a version that resolves to nothing.

8. Tests

node --test tests/site/*.mjs — 17 checks, no dependencies:

every page is a whole document with a title and description
no page talks to a parent window (the host frame is gone and stays gone)
every internal link resolves to a file that exists
every page has a canonical URL and a markdown twin, and the twin is there
every page shows the same version, and it matches versions/index.json and riskmandate_ai/version
the menu is the same list everywhere and every entry is a real page
the version record is newest-first, every entry has its notes and names its source, and vault-era entries are labelled reconstructed
the sitemap lists every page and nothing else
no write credential ships in site/
the scenarios content contract (6 checks against a real vault fixture)

9. What is not here any more

vault_publisher/ — cloned 7rfetjwz and published it. Nothing publishes from a vault now.
web_overlay/ — pages overlaid onto the publisher's output. site/ is the output; there is nothing to overlay onto. The scenarios pilot moved to site/scenarios/.
site/v0/ — twelve frozen design snapshots, ~759KB, reachable through a dropdown. They are in vault 7rfetjwz, which is kept.
the host shell — a 9KB index.html that loaded a version page into an <iframe srcdoc> and routed navigation over postMessage. It gave the whole site one URL. Deep links, bookmarks, opening in a new tab and search indexing all now work because it is gone.

scripts/migrate/collapse-to-v1.mjs is the one-off that did the conversion. It is kept as the statement of what "reconstructed" means for v1.0.0 — run it against a fresh clone of the vault and it reproduces the snapshot. Nothing in CI runs it.