Everything a Bill Carries

This is the stress-test bill: every reading affordance the template has, crammed onto one sheet to see whether it stays readable or turns into a demo of itself. It's filler — but filler shaped exactly like the busiest real post could get.

A bill is mostly type, with a few things pasted alongside¹

Most of it is paragraphs like this one: a plain claim, a qualifier, a short second sentence. But some posts need a list, a table, or a picture of the thing being described, and the sheet has to hold all of it without losing the reader.

• Wayfinding stays printed on the paper, never a navbar
• Texture whispers; the typesetting is the star
• Annotations are used sparingly, and only when they earn the space

When the order actually matters, the same list takes numbers²:

1. Draft the claim in plain paragraphs first
2. Add structure only where the plain version gets confusing
3. Cut anything that is there only to look finished

Ordering is a small tax worth paying

Numbered lists cost the reader a beat of extra attention². Worth paying when sequence carries meaning — steps, a ranking, a chronology — and not otherwise.

A blockquote should earn its indent, not just decorate the page.

Inline code has to survive mid-sentence too, like wallPage(posts) sitting in a line without breaking the baseline. A fenced block should hold one genuinely long line, so horizontal scroll can be checked on a phone as well as a monitor:

const totalPasteSoakByBoardAndSeamOffset = computeSeamOffsets(boards).map((seam, i) => tintForSeam(seam, boards[i], i, WEATHER_TABLE[i % WEATHER_TABLE.length]))
console.log(totalPasteSoakByBoardAndSeamOffset.join(', '))

A short table can carry a comparison faster than three paragraphs would³:

Affordance	Where it lives	Fails silently?
Footnotes	small print at the foot of the sheet	No — undefined refs warn at build
Captions	under a standalone image	Yes, if the title attribute is empty
Feed link	the colophon, every page	No — always printed

The plate below is a placeholder, not a photograph — a light field with a few dark shapes standing in for a diagram, so the plate treatment and its caption have something to frame.

The caption did that work in the small print, where a bill's captions actually live — no aside required to explain the picture.

Notes

1. Every word here is placeholder copy, kept clearly filler on purpose so it is never mistaken for a real post. ↩

2. This is the multi-reference case: the same note is called twice above, so both superscripts should resolve to one shared entry, with a return arrow for each call. ↩ ↩

3. A longer definition, to check that wrapped footnote text still sits comfortably at small-print size — long enough to run past one line on a narrow phone, which is exactly the case worth checking, since short definitions never reveal a line-height problem. ↩