Explanation#

Why the design is the way it is. None of this is needed to use Scenet — it is here because the decisions are the interesting part, and because a decision whose reasoning is lost gets reversed by accident later.

Design decisions

The load-bearing choices, and what each one costs

Prior art

What already exists, what was taken from it, and what was deliberately not used

Implementation status

What actually runs, as opposed to what is specified

The one-paragraph version#

Music has notation; images do not. SVG describes how to draw, not what is depicted — it is closer to a WAV file than to a score. Scenet is an attempt at the missing layer, narrowed to one tractable domain, and built as a deterministic compiler rather than a generative model, so that the same source always produces the same picture and you can reason about why.

The three tiers, and why there are three#

*.panel.yaml  →  IR (scene graph)  →  Panel Core (.core.json)  →  SVG
  authored         validated            resolved, numeric          emitted

The frontend never computes a coordinate. The solver never touches artwork. The emitter never makes a layout decision.

The middle tier is the unusual one, and it is borrowed from Vega-Lite, which compiles a high-level grammar into a lower-level one before emitting anything drawable. Panel Core is a real, writable format rather than a hidden data structure, which buys three things:

  • A layout can be inspected without reading SVG.

  • A layout can be hand-adjusted and fed back in, so the compiler is a starting point rather than an authority.

  • Golden-file tests mean something. Core changes only when the layout genuinely changes; SVG text changes when an attribute is reordered.

What is deliberately not here#

  • No generative image model, anywhere in the pipeline. Not as a fallback, not for “polish”. The whole claim of the project is that the output is explicable.

  • No A* for balloon tails. A tail is a short tapered stroke; grid pathfinding produces a jointed path that looks nothing like one drawn by hand.

  • No natural-language interpretation of prose. A comic script’s descriptions are preserved and never parsed. Guessing at “a rainy street corner” would produce a compiler whose output you cannot predict, which is the thing this is not.

  • No TypeScript reimplementation of the compiler. The browser playground runs the real Python under WebAssembly, so there is no second copy of the geometry to drift.

Each of these is argued in full in design decisions and prior art.