The bar lifts the corpus

The bar had five entries and three of them were about money: Statewide, Places, Findings, Scenario, Reference. That was an accurate description of the site for as long as the site was a funding calculator with notes attached.

It stopped being accurate some time ago. .yidam/corpus/ holds 117 nodes across eighteen classes — sixteen acts from an 1851 constitutional duty to the FY2026-27 budget, six cases, five funding regimes, sixteen formula components, the parameters a budget sets when it computes them. That is a substantial reference work about how Ohio arranges school money, and the only way into it was a menu item called Wiki, under a heading called Reference, which is the place a reader looks last and the word that says “this is the appendix”.

Three specific failures followed from it.

Statute was three clicks deep. Reference → Wiki → read down a list of eighteen class names → Legislation. Nothing in the bar said Ohio’s school funding statute was on this site.

Every wiki page reported itself as Reference. A reader who arrived at H.B. 110 from a search — which is how most readers arrive anywhere — was told by the bar that they were in the appendix of a site whose main body they had not seen.

The root was a dense financial panel. / was the statewide view: foundation aid totals, the guarantee share, wealth neutrality, four cards of figures. A reader landing there had been handed an answer before they asked anything, and the answer was about the one axis they were most likely to find on their own. The axes that were not about money had nowhere to be introduced, because the front door was already a view of something.

Five axes, two of them lifted from the corpus, and a front door that is not a view.

Places▾    Law▾    Formula▾    Research▾    Reference▾

Law carries legislation, litigation and doctrine; Formula carries the funding regimes and the components, parameters and metrics they are built from. Research is the old Findings with Scenario folded into it — and the rename settles a collision that predates this decision, because findings is also the name of a prose genre on every corpus node, meaning what this repository computed as against description, what Ohio does. Two meanings, one word, in one interface.

Statewide moves under Places, where it belongs: it is the widest place, above all 609 districts. / becomes a front door — what this is, how to find a district, the three questions the site answers, and the five sections — and it takes no entry in the bar at all. The brand mark opens it, which is the convention a reader already has.

Which acts the Law menu names is derived, not chosen. Three rules over edges the corpus already carries:

1. the act establishes a funding regime — H.B. 1, H.B. 153, H.B. 110;
2. the act does not appropriate, so it is not a biennial budget — Article VI §2, H.B. 920, and H.B. 583, which corrected the Fair School Funding Plan between budgets;
3. it is the most recently signed act that does appropriate — the budget in force.

Seven of sixteen, and no list anywhere. web/src/lib/nav.ts computes the whole bar; web/src/layouts/Base.astro renders what it is given and decides nothing.

A menu of seven chosen out of sixteen is an editorial judgment, and a typed list does not record it. The judgment would live in whoever typed the list, the corpus would never learn it, and the list would be wrong the day an act was added — silently, because a stale menu renders and resolves exactly like a current one. Rule 3 is the clearest case: when H.B. 96 is succeeded, the menu re-points itself with no edit anywhere.

The homepage reads its section list from the same module. A bar and a front door that can disagree about what the site contains is the navigability defect this work exists to fix, and a hand-written list on the homepage is precisely how they come to disagree.

Nothing derived ships without a check that can fail. Two thirds of the bar now comes out of .yidam/corpus/, so a node renamed there writes a dead link into the header of all 3,486 pages and nothing else would notice. tests/unit/nav.spec.ts asserts the rules select what they claim and that every corpus link lands on something that exists; the end-to-end suite opens all thirty hrefs. Every one of those checks was verified by introducing the defect it guards and watching it fail — twelve of them, of which one passed the first time and had to be rewritten.

Nothing in the bar is one click away any more. Statewide and Scenario were plain links and are now inside menus; all five entries are disclosures. This is a real loss and it is paid for two things — the bar holds five axes rather than three, and a bar that mixes links with disclosures teaches a reader nothing about which is which until they have clicked both. The search field beside it is the one-click path, and it is the path most readers want.

/ moved to /statewide, and no redirect is possible. The build is static with build.format: "file". An old bookmark of / lands on the front door, which is the right destination; nothing ever had /statewide to break. Two section anchors moved with their cards from statewide to a new home family in routes.ts — the anchors are unchanged, so a link into #three-questions from a board packet still finds the section it named.

No case is named in the menu, and DeRolph is the most recognizable thing here. The corpus holds no short name for a case: labels are full citations, and Cincinnati City School District Board of Education v. Walter (1979) is sixty-two characters. The obvious derivation — the parenthetical — reads DeRolph I (1997) correctly and then reads Franklin County (2025) off EdChoice Constitutional Challenge (Franklin County, 2025), a venue offered as the name of a case, in the bar, on every page. Litigation is one link with its count until the corpus can say better. open a short name on litigation.ont.yml and its six nodes would fix it, and would also serve a statute timeline and a case’s own breadcrumb.

The Law panel is the one at risk of outgrowing its viewport. A <details> has no scroll of its own, so a run past roughly a dozen items leaves its tail below the fold under a sticky header. It is ten today and every act added to the corpus is a candidate; a unit check fails at thirteen rather than letting it happen quietly.

One tab per class — Legislation, Litigation, Formula. Closest to how the redesign was first described, and it makes the pattern generalize: a lifted class is a tab, its instances are the panel. Rejected on width. Seven top-level entries plus a search field is near the point the bar’s own history says it wrapped to a second row, and Legislation and Litigation are the two entries a reader is least likely to distinguish at a glance — DeRolph is about the statutes.

Legislation only, to prove the pattern before committing. Cheap and safe, and it would have left Formula — sixteen components and the parameters a budget sets, the machinery every figure on the site comes out of — exactly where it was.

A landmark list on the legislation nodes themselves. A landmark: true property would be corpus-side and reviewable, which is the right instinct. It is still a judgment recorded as an assertion rather than derived from what the acts do, and the three rules turned out to select the same seven acts a hand-made list would have — with the difference that they explain why each one is there, and keep selecting after the next budget.