Musewoods · GroveGrove Presentation Laboratory

Masthead & Navigation

Every Grove wears one masthead. This page is a specimen of it.

  • one shell
  • one masthead architecture
  • two semantic navigation shapes

The masthead you are reading right now — the global Musewoods strip, this Grove's identity, and the local navigation line beneath it — is the same component on every Grove in Musewoods. It is not re-invented per site. The manifest supplies identity and destinations; the renderer supplies all geometry. There are no author-facing masthead layout keys.

The Anatomy

Global Musewoods nav · Grove identity (logo, name, optional inscription) · local Grove nav · page content.

That order never changes, and no Grove adds a fourth band. The masthead answers one question — which Grove am I inside? The page threshold answers the other — what is this page about? They are not the same and the masthead never carries page-scale display type.

Two Semantic Shapes

Local navigation has exactly two shapes, and the mode is derived from the manifest, never authored.

Flat is a plain navigation: list. This laboratory's own masthead is flat: Laboratory · Ground Modes · Analytical Storytelling · Rhythm · Field Notes · Masthead. The Governed Data Foundry is the golden flat specimen — five destinations on one restrained line.

Grouped declares navigation_groups: and gives every entry a group:. Groups are information architecture, not layout rows: they render inline on the same single line as a small taxonomy label followed by its destinations, with a quiet renderer-drawn separator between groups.

The Rules It Enforces

  1. 01 One mode, never mixed

    Declare navigation_groups and every entry must name a group. A loose top-level entry beside grouped ones is a build failure, not a silent bucket.

  2. 02 Order is authored, never alphabetised

    Group order is the navigation_groups order, and it must match the order groups first appear in navigation. Each group's entries must form a contiguous run. The build never reorders the list to fix this — it fails and says where.

  3. 03 Desktop never wraps

    Flat or grouped, the local navigation is one physical row. On a narrow desktop or tablet it scrolls locally; it never breaks to a second line and never causes page-level horizontal overflow. Mobile swaps to the standard disclosure menu, and grouped navigation keeps its group headings there.

  4. 04 Labels are wayfinding, not headlines

    A nav label is a short signpost. Analytical System becomes Analytics; Architecture & Validation becomes Architecture. It need not reproduce the page H1.

Capacity

ShapeIdealSupportedWarns
Flat entries1–67–8more than 8
Groups2–34more than 4
Destinations per group2–45more than 5
Any nav labelshortup to ~18 characterslonger

These are authoring diagnostics surfaced by npm run content:check. They never fail the build — dense but valid information architecture is allowed — but they name the Grove and give an actionable next step: shorten labels, or consolidate top-level territories.

What Ground Does Not Change

  1. Structure

    Soil and Forest Floor render the identical masthead component. Ground swaps tokens — ink, rule, surface, accent — not the row count, the logo placement, the grouping semantics, or the navigation geometry.

  2. Active state

    Exactly one destination is active, marked with a stronger foreground and a thin field-accent rule. No pills, no filled tabs, no boxed buttons — the quiet Musewoods treatment on both Grounds.

  3. Focus

    Keyboard focus is :focus-visible, and it is visibly distinct from the active-route state. A mouse click never leaves persistent focus styling that could be mistaken for the active page.