What exists to work with it

An entry names something that is in this project and that a reader could use today. A plan is not an entry. Where a thing is packaged, the page states the digest the project publishes for it, because a binary named on a website with no digest beside it is an invitation and not an offer.

The implementations

The fleet, as a roster: what exists and what each one is written in. Every one of them was written from the specification alone by a different author who could not see the others, which is the argument the bootstrapping page makes at length and this page only points at.

11 maintained implementations, no two of them in the same language, and 3 more kept in the archive. Every number about them — what each scores, on what, and when it was last measured — is on the bootstrapping page, read from the same document this roster is.

A DELIBERATE PROPERTY AND NOT AN ACCIDENT. A second implementation in a language already covered is a second reading of the same standard library and the same habits; a new language is a new set of things the specification can be silently wrong about. Every one of these found something, and the C++ one found a question no earlier author could have asked, because C++ is the first of them whose standard library has no Unicode categories.

Three implementations are archived rather than deleted, and they are on the bootstrapping page with their scores. A superseded implementation that still fails documents is evidence about what is hard, and deleting it would be deleting the evidence.

The editors

Two editors can open a .umsg file and show it as a document rather than as text. Both of them do it by handing the buffer to an implementation in this project, so what they show is what a conformant reader sees — and when they cannot parse, they say where and recover as soon as it parses again, rather than showing a stale rendering of something that no longer exists.

THE RULE BOTH OF THEM FOLLOW, and it is the one that makes a generic reader worth having. Neither renderer has a table of key names it recognises. A one-entry map envelope becomes the title, authored order becomes the page order, a uniform sequence of maps becomes a table — every rule is about the SHAPE of the value. A renderer that special-cased title would be a viewer for the documents its author happened to have.

The applets

A PROTOCOL FOR PORTABLE INTERACTIVE DOCUMENTS. An applet is a WebAssembly module exporting a state machine — a fresh state, a transition on an event, and a projection — and a host executes it and owns every effect on the world. The module computes; it cannot reach anything.

WHAT CROSSES THAT BOUNDARY IS UNIMSG IN CANONICAL CBOR, in both directions and without exception. So the same value encodes to the same bytes on every host, every number arrives exact, and an event going in and a surface coming back are documents rather than conventions two programs happen to agree on.

AND THIS IS THE PART THIS SITE CARES ABOUT. What an applet returns from render is a DOCUMENT a host builds an interface from, never a picture of one. Three kinds are named: an interface, a drawing, and an interface with a document inside it — and there is an applet below for each. A host reading one builds real controls with real focus and a real accessibility tree, because what it was handed says what the things ARE rather than where to paint them.

THE MANIFEST IS A UNIMSG DOCUMENT AND THE MODULE SITS INSIDE IT. The bytes are carried inline, beside the sha256 that pins them, together with the applet's identity, its version, the modes a host may open it in, and the intents it will accept with their defaults. A host needs nothing else: no second artefact to pair, no relative path to resolve, no fetch to perform, and nothing that can go missing between the two halves.

THE HASH IS VERIFIED WHATEVER THE BYTES CAME FROM, including when they arrived in the same file as the hash. Trusting one half of a file because you trust the other leaves no way to notice a broken artefact, and the protocol says so in those words.

IT IS ALSO A LESSON THIS PROJECT KEEPS RELEARNING. Carrying the module was permitted from the start and nothing did it, so every generator produced two files and every host author concluded that was what an applet WAS — until one asked. A default nobody states is a default somebody else picks.

A HOST, NOT AN APPLET. Each page below carries the module's bytes, the manifest, the open path, the ABI, the drawing projector and a unimsg codec, all inlined into one file: no src, no href, no URL, no fetch. That is a bundle built to prove the protocol needs no transport, and the proof is that it runs at all. The applet inside it is the one document.

NO TRANSPORT, NO IDENTITY SYSTEM, NO RELAY AND NO STORAGE. A host supplies all four. An identity is an opaque value a host attributes an event to — a key, a username, a device id, or the constant local — and the protocol compares two of them for equality and asks nothing further. A reader should not be able to tell from the specification which host was written first, which is the same discipline the format itself is held to.

BECAUSE IT IS THE ARGUMENT RUNNING RATHER THAN BEING MADE. Everywhere else this site shows a document beside its bytes and asks a reader to accept that the second form is worth something. Here it is being decoded, stepped and projected in the reader's browser by a program written in another language for another project, and what is on the screen is what came back.

AND NEITHER RESTATES WHAT IT CARRIES. The chess module contains no chess: it interprets a ruleset document and draws through a board-presentation document, both of which are in this project, are checked by tools that are not the applet, and can be opened on this site. The prose applet renders a document it did not write, carried whole as canonical CBOR. That is the strongest form of the claim this whole site makes — a document being acted on by something that was not written to make its argument.

Each one verifies its module against the sha256 in its own manifest and prints the result under itself, in the reader's browser, while they watch. That is where the digest on this page comes from — there is no second copy of it here to go stale against the first.

Highlighting

Four things colour unimsg in this project, and three of them are real implementations being asked what the tokens are rather than patterns that approximate the answer.

So the highlighting follows whichever theme the reader already chose. An extension that ships a palette is an extension that looks wrong in every theme but the one its author uses.

Two independent readings of the same grammar colour this site — the generator's, in Go, at build time, and the JavaScript implementation's lexer, in the browser — and the playground shows one document coloured by each. If they ever disagree, a reader can see it. That is this project's whole method pointed at its own website.

Elsewhere

A companion is linked because it exists and is about this format, not because anything on it is stable or blessed. The status travels with the link, so the sentence a reader gets is what the thing is and how finished it is, in that order.

ribosome.unimsg.net — a generic renderer and presentation layer for unimsg documents. Experimental, and a separate project from this site.