The /1 family
Standards, versioned like software
Every format is a version, never a mutation. Every parser refuses rather than guesses. And the two tenses are shaped differently on purpose: an intention decays and is never sealed; a fact about the past is sealed and never decays.
| Format | Tense / role | The rule that defines it |
|---|---|---|
| shipped/1 | past | Sealed once, kept forever; an emit is a union, never a replacement. |
| backlog/1 | future | Decays unless renewed; private until a named human promotes. |
| directory/1 | present | One id, one authority; partners borrowed, never fabricated. |
| checkpoint/1 | proof | A Merkle head over the sealed past; unsigned until a witness exists. |
| countersign | proof | The party a claim is about signs it — stated is not countersigned. |
| frontdoor/1 | door | What each lane asks and owes, including the honest no-SLA rung. |
| holding/1 | positions | Transitions, not states; no currency figures in v1, by refusal list. |
| delivery/1 | rungs | The distance between merged and had — the estate’s recurring gap, measured. |
| aao (charter) | governance | Named roles, an accountable human, thresholds agents cannot cross. |
| canon/1 | facts | A lockfile for numbers: one authority per fact, many renderers. |
| bolt/1 | play | A hunt verified by commitment, in the finder’s own browser. |
| playbook/1 | coordination | How organisations work together, published before it is needed. |
Publication is gated, and the gate is the promise
A format publishes as an open standard when the first organisation the estate does not control adopts it — and not before. Captive adoption is evidence about a relationship, not about a format. The magician-layer formats (trust/1, introduction/1, beacon/1, grant/1) state the same gate on magician.network.
15 formats are catalogued here; each detail page carries the contracts its parser enforces and the edge cases behind them.