Add RFC process, specifications, layered tests, and a gated CI/CD pipeline

[Protonmatter]

What this changes

Introduces an RFC process, normative specifications, a five-layer test suite, and a CI pipeline that gates the Pages deploy on it. Also fixes two defects the work surfaced.

Why

The site deployed on every push with nothing verifying the result. For a site whose value is that it renders correctly, the interesting failures are silent ones: a path that stops resolving, a deck that stops advancing, prose that stops being true. None are caught by a build step, because there is no build step — they have to be caught by executing the pages.

Process — RFC 0001

Substantive changes are proposed as a numbered RFC, specified as requirements in docs/specs/ carrying RFC 2119 keywords and stable identifiers, and covered by tests annotated @REQ <ID>.

tools/spec-trace.js fails the build when a MUST-level requirement has no test, a test names a requirement that does not exist, or an identifier is defined twice — so the specification and the suite cannot drift apart.

71 requirements, 58 mandatory, 125 tests.

Pipeline — RFC 0002

Layer	Runner	Owns
Validation	node --test	Repository consistency, before a browser is involved (~1s)
Functional	Playwright	Does each page behave as specified?
End-to-end	Playwright	Can a visitor complete a journey across pages?
Regression	Playwright	Have invariants and past defects stayed fixed?
Visual	Playwright	Does it still look right? (CI-only)

ci.yml is a reusable workflow called both by the pull-request check and by pages.yml before it deploys, so the merge gate and the deploy gate cannot diverge. A red gate now leaves the live site untouched.

Browser tests stub external font requests for determinism and fail on any other off-origin request, enforcing the no-CDN rule at runtime as well as in source. Visual comparison is pinned to ubuntu-24.04 and skips loudly when no baseline exists rather than writing one and passing; baselines are seeded by the Update visual baselines workflow, which opens a pull request of images.

Defects fixed

Every deck rendered blank on any Windows clone. support.js loads the vendored React bundles with a Subresource Integrity digest, and SRI hashes exact bytes. With no .gitattributes, Git's default Windows behaviour rewrote LF to CRLF on checkout, the digests stopped matching, React never loaded — and because the runtime hides the authored markup before booting, the pages rendered nothing at all, with HTTP 200 and no broken links.

The published site was never affected, which is what made this so hard to diagnose: it only ever broke on a contributor's machine, with no visible cause. .gitattributes prevents it; SITE-016 detects it. Verified against a fresh clone as byte-identical to the committed blob.

Six pages had no <title> and no lang. The five .dc.html pages and pocket-planetarium.html declared neither, leaving browser tabs, bookmarks and print-to-PDF filenames unnamed — on decks explicitly meant to be printed.

Known deviations, now recorded rather than implicit

Both in docs/specs/site.spec.md:

• D-1 — the Pocket Planetarium is served by a separate runtime copy that loads React and Babel from unpkg, so it is not CDN-free. The README no longer claims the whole site is.
• D-2 — the deck runtime requests un-substituted {{ }} template placeholders before boot, producing three harmless 404s on the explorer.

Each is excluded from the requirement it violates in one named place, with a reason, rather than the requirement being quietly written loose enough to pass.

Requirements touched

Adds the initial requirement set: SITE, DOCS, DECK, LAND, BETA, EXPL, FLOW, VIS. All 58 mandatory requirements are covered; the two uncovered SHOULD-level ones (SITE-013, BETA-005) are reported as notes by design.

Checklist

• npm test passes locally (21 validation, traceability OK, 104 browser)
• New behaviour is specified in docs/specs/ and annotated @REQ in tests
• README statements about the build are true again (slide counts, CDN claim)
• Known deviations recorded in the specification

Visual impact

None. The six pages gain a <title> and lang attribute; nothing rendered changes. No visual baselines exist yet — seed them with the Update visual baselines workflow after merge.