Only checklist items could be ticked, which answers "what have I done" but not
the question a long procedure actually raises: where was I. Somebody looks away
to do the thing the guide asked for and looks back at a wall of text.
Every step and every heading now carries a checkbox while reading. Ticking one
strikes it through and fades it rather than hiding it, because somebody
scanning back up the page has to still be able to read what they did. The
number is struck through with it, but the step's own "Step 3" label is not -
that is the address of the thing, not part of what was done.
Headings count, not just steps. A guide converted from an HTML article often
has fifty headings and no steps at all, and those are exactly the guides long
enough to lose your place in. That also means the card's "N steps to tick"
stops reading as a broken feature on a guide that is entirely tickable.
Reading only, as the checklists already were: in the editor a tick would be an
edit, and an author clicking around their own draft would quietly change what
the next reader sees as done. Progress stays per browser and per version -
shopfloor PCs share a login, so one technician's ticks must not greet the next
person on that bay, and step 4 of version 3 is not step 4 of version 2.
The knowledgebase plugin is a link registry - a description, a URL and some
keywords pointing at a document held somewhere else. That leaves the documents
themselves as HTML files on a share: no search, no history, no way to know
whether the copy pinned to a noticeboard is current, and no way for a technician
to tick off where they are.
A guide is stored as an ordered list of typed blocks rather than a blob of
HTML, because three of the four things this feature exists for depend on it. A
tickable step needs a stable id to be remembered; dark mode needs semantic
markup rather than pasted colours; and print needs to know where a step begins
so it does not split one across a page. Free HTML gives none of that and lets
pasted styling fight the theme.
Inline text is a restricted Markdown subset - bold, italic, inline code, links,
line breaks - escaped BEFORE formatting, so nothing an author pasted can reach
the DOM as markup. No fonts, sizes or colours: emphasis is semantic and the
theme decides how it looks. That is what makes a guide written next year match
one written today, and dark mode work without an author thinking about it.
DRAFTS AND VERSIONS. The guide row is the working copy; every save that changes
something writes an immutable revision; and a separate pointer says which
revision READERS get. Without that pointer, editing a live procedure changes it
under a technician who is halfway through following it. Publishing promotes an
existing revision rather than snapshotting, so a publish with unsaved edits
cannot ship a version nobody reviewed. Restoring writes a new revision with old
content, so the record of what people were told in between survives.
Saves dedup on a content hash covering title, summary, tags and blocks, so an
autosave that changed nothing writes no version - otherwise the history fills
with identical entries and hides the three edits that mattered.
Progress lives in the browser, not the database: shopfloor PCs share a login, so
per-user ticks would show one technician's progress to the next person on that
bay, which reads as "already done". Keyed by guide and version, because step 4
of version 3 is not step 4 of version 2.
Five permissions, and the split between edit and publish is the point: a
technician can write a procedure up while somebody else decides it is fit for
the floor. create-without-edit works too - an author may edit their own guide
until it is published, after which other people are following it.
