It struck the heading and left everything underneath looking untouched, which
is the opposite of what somebody ticking "this section is done" means. The
strike now covers every block under that heading, down to the next heading of
the same or higher rank - so a top-level section takes its sub-sections with
it.
That needed the rank, and the HTML importer was throwing it away: h2, h3 and h4
all arrived as a flat 'heading', so a parent heading had no children to cross
out. It was the visible half of a real loss - a converted article kept its
words and lost its shape. Headings now carry their level and render at it, and
a guide written before this reads as flat, exactly as it did.
Code blocks, tables and images inside a finished section fade but are not
struck. A line through a command makes it unreadable, and re-reading the
command is usually the reason to look back at a step already done.
The five imported guides were re-imported so they carry their structure.
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.
Guides are written on one site and needed on all of them, and the sites that
matter are air-gapped from wherever the writing happens. Until now a procedure
was stranded in the database it was typed into: the HTML importer could rebuild
one from its original article, but anything authored in the editor had nowhere
to go.
flask guides export writes one .guide.json per guide, with every image the
blocks reference carried inside it as base64. One file on purpose - a bundle
that needs its images copied alongside it is a bundle that will eventually
arrive without them. flask guides import reads them back, a directory at a
time, and refuses anything that is not a bundle before it writes a row rather
than half-importing a stray .json sitting in the same folder.
What travels is the content: title, summary, tags, blocks, images. What does
not is ids, revision history, authorship and publication state, because those
belong to whichever database issued them - an imported guide starts as a draft
at revision 1, owned by whoever ran the import. The SLUG does travel: it is the
address somebody pastes into a work order, and the same guide should answer to
the same name on every site.
--replace updates the guide already carrying that slug instead of creating a
second one, which is how a corrected guide is re-shipped. It drops the stored
images first: the incoming bundle is the whole truth for that guide, and a
guide re-shipped monthly would otherwise accumulate orphans nothing points at.
Bundles refuse a version they are too old to read rather than importing the
parts they recognise. A newer site's guide is not a guide this one can be
trusted to render.
Proven by round-tripping a five-guide export back into the same site, including
one carrying two PNG screenshots, and reading it in a browser.
A site adopting this app arrives holding procedures already written: styled
HTML pages that get mailed around, opened off a share, and edited by whoever
still has the file. Those pages are exactly what a guide is for, and retyping
one into the editor is how a good procedure stays on a share forever.
flask guides import-html reads the page and produces blocks. It recognises the
vocabulary those pages actually use - a step box with its own number, an alert
in one of three colours, a code block with a copy button, a checkbox list, a
table with a header row - and maps each to the block that already renders it,
lifting embedded images into guideimages so a document stops carrying its
screenshots as base64. Page furniture goes: the header, the footer, and the
table of contents a guide builds for itself from its own headings.
The conversion is lossy on purpose. Colour, fonts, width and nested layout are
dropped, because storing blocks rather than markup is what makes dark mode,
printing and tickable steps work at all. So an import is always a DRAFT and the
default is a dry run that reports what it would produce and writes nothing.
Blocks go through the same validator the API uses: an import must not be able
to store something the editor could not have produced.
The parser is tolerant, because real articles are not well-formed. An unclosed
<p> is normal HTML and the browser closes it at the next block element; without
the same rule one unclosed tag swallows the rest of the article into a single
paragraph, which is what it did before the test caught it.
Proven end to end against four real articles, including one carrying two PNG
screenshots, read back in a browser.
Printing a dark-mode page lays a full page of toner down for the background and
knocks the text out of it in white. On a shopfloor printer that is a cartridge
for a handful of guides, and the result is harder to read than the plain
version. Somebody would have found this the expensive way.
The theme tokens are redefined for print only, in an unscoped block because
overriding them has to reach :root. Every guide element already renders through
those variables rather than literal colours, so this is a dozen lines instead of
a rewrite - the same discipline that made dark mode work without dark-mode code.
Backgrounds are dropped rather than printed grey: a callout is identified by its
rule and its heading, which cost nothing. Checkboxes print EMPTY even where they
are ticked on screen, because a printed guide is a worksheet somebody carries to
the bay, and one person's progress is not part of the procedure. The footer
gains the print date beside the version, so a stale copy pinned to a noticeboard
can be spotted.
Also corrects the model and migration found by running this against a real
database rather than SQLite: BaseModel contributes createddate, modifieddate and
isactive to every table and the migration never created them, so the first read
failed on unknown columns; the model had also declared duplicate timestamps on
top, now removed with the API field names kept stable. And the slug is 191
characters, not 300 - it is UNIQUE-indexed, MySQL caps an index key at 767
bytes, and utf8mb4 is 4 bytes per character.
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.
