# Hierarchy — what a screen shows, and at what weight

[composition.md](./composition.md) says which shape carries which meaning. This says how much of
the data reaches the reader at all, in what order, and how loudly. The numbers are
[constitution.md](./constitution.md)'s; which entry draws a thing is [catalog.md](./catalog.md)'s.

The failure it prevents is every surface drawn at one weight: no single part is wrong, and the
reader cannot find anything.

## Three tiers

**Everything a surface holds is primary, secondary or tertiary, and the sort IS the design.**

| Tier | What it is | How it is drawn |
|---|---|---|
| Primary | what the job needs NOW — what the reader decides with, and the act that follows | first, unscrolled, in its own device at full ink |
| Secondary | context read on demand — the value consulted when something looks wrong | further down, or behind ONE disclosure |
| Tertiary | provenance — who entered it, when, where it came from | last, at the caption rung, or a stamp on the thing it explains |

**A summary goes BELOW the controls that produce it**, so the reader sees what they asked for
before what it came to.

**Name the JOB the surface exists for and the tier falls out.** It is not a vote on importance:
the same field is primary on the desk that acts on it and tertiary on the record that merely
carries it. A field nobody can name a decision for is tertiary.

**What the screen KNOWS and what it SHOWS are two lists, never one.** The rows carry every fact the
query returned; the columns carry the ones the reader decides with.

**SMALL is not QUIET.** Recede with ink, not with size (`constitution.md` §3); a caption at a
smaller size in default ink still shouts, and one demoted in BOTH has left its subject and become a
caption under a heading. One axis.

### How a record derives them

**PLACED is the test, and a default SUBTRACTS.** A field the author put in a group is drawn in its
place, empty or not — absence is work somebody owes, and a field that vanishes when unset cannot
be filled ([data_entry.md](./data_entry.md)). What the author placed NOWHERE is not drawn at all:
a fold of the leftovers held figures drawn elsewhere and provenance, a press spent on nothing.

**Facts are a compact grid** — an editable value rests as its control, a read-only one as text.
A glance is WIDE (`composition.md`) **and SHORT**: the first band holds what the screen was opened
for.

## One primary act per surface

**One act is primary. Everything else is quiet, and the outcomes are in a menu.** A second filled
button halves the first, and a row of four says the surface has no opinion about what to do. A
SECTION is a surface, and so is the band that names the record: the count is taken under one heading.

- **Primary** — the act the surface exists for, one per surface, at the end of the work it commits.
  A record section's is the act its fields feed — never a placeholder.
- **Secondary** — peers the reader reaches for often, at rest weight, beside it.
- **The menu** — the outcomes, the corrections, the rarely-taken. A destructive act is the fence's,
  never a peer of the primary one.

**An act taken once a year costs the one taken every hour nothing.** Frequency decides the ladder,
not how consequential the act sounds in a meeting.

## One fact, one place

**A value a stronger device already states is not drawn again.** Not as a second fact, not as a
column, not as a badge. The band's figure is not also a fact row; a day's heading is not also a
date column; the header's name is not also a Name field; a lifecycle rung is not also a status
pill.

**The stronger device is the one that shows the value AND what it means** — a meter over a bare
number, a heading over the cell it repeats on every row, an editor over a reading of the same
field. When two places both want a value, the weaker one drops it.

**The test is subtraction, not judgement**: cover one of the two — read the screen with it gone —
and ask whether anything was lost. If nothing was, it was noise.

## Depth — four surfaces, four jobs

**Every surface in the chain shows LESS than the next and enough to decide whether to open it.**
Repeating the whole of one inside the other is how a chain stops paying for itself.

| Surface | Carries | Not this |
|---|---|---|
| Register row | identity, and the job's ONE figure | a second figure because the column was free |
| Drawer | the head, then the sections stacked | a second anatomy, so the two doors disagree |
| Page | the same sections, a rail to reach each, the comments beside | a tab hiding a part of the work |
| Section | one step of the work: its fields, its acts under them, what it holds | an act far from the fields it needs |

**Beside the sections stands only the record's discussion**: the comments. Anything else parked
there competes with the work: it is a section.

**Related records are LINKS.** Rows that merely name this record are handed to the register that
owns them; a run of folds down the page is an outline of other people's work.

**A record of somebody the business DEALS WITH is the exception.** Its dealings are what the page
is read for, so every register whose rows NAME it — their party, their subject — stands in its
Related section, counted, its latest few rows open and the rest one press away: a supplier shows its
orders, claims and payments, not one list and two counts.

## Markers on the minority side

**Mark the exception, never the rule.** A mark that is the same on every row carries nothing, and
one that is a different HUE on every row carries less: draw what is late rather than what is on
time, what is missing rather than what arrived, what is blocked rather than what is running. Where
the minority flips — a set that is mostly late — the mark flips with it, because the reader is
scanning for the few.

## Colour carries meaning only

**One accent, and where it goes is "where you are", and nothing else** (`constitution.md` §8) — a
page-scale position marker takes `primary`. **Tones mean state** — the valence families, whose
colour IS the meaning. **Marks are neutral** unless the hue is data.

**A colour that says "this is a heading" or "this is that kind of section" is decoration**, and it
spends the one signal a screen has for the thing that actually needs it.

## Whitespace is structure

**No box is taller than its content's floor.** A card padded to a height nothing fills claims a
weight its content does not have, and a row of them claims they are peers — so **cards in a row END
ON ONE LINE**, and the imbalance is fixed in the CONTENT, never by letting one run two lines past
its neighbours. **Flat for work execution and data capture; carded for monitoring** — a person
entering values wants one uninterrupted column, a person scanning states wants the states boxed
apart.

**An empty section costs a line, not a card** — one sentence in the reader's own language and the
act that fills it (`composition.md` § Empty states).

**Air is the grouping device; a border is for a thing you press** (`constitution.md` §6).

## Ink and air state what a thing is

**A reader who has to press to find out what a thing is was told nothing**, and each of these is
countable off a rendered screen ([reviewing.md](./reviewing.md)).

| What | Drawn as |
|---|---|
| A section's heading | its WORDS — no glyph for the KIND of section. A mark belongs to the page's own title, which names one subject, and to a navigation item, which is scanned |
| An editor at rest | a CLOSED frame: four painted sides, on the control or on the box that paints for it. Three sides is decoration |
| A focus ring | whole — its painted extent inside every box that clips it |
| Two named groups | further apart than the rows inside either. An equal gap says they are one list |

## Budgets a reviewer can count

| Count | Budget |
|---|---|
| Primary facts and the open act on the surface, against those visible without scrolling | equal — one under the fold is mis-ranked, at 1280 and at 375 alike |
| Primary acts per surface | 1 |
| Accents per page | 1 |
| Folds over a record's facts | 0 |
| Tabs drawn with nothing to show | 0 |
| Places any one value is drawn | 1 |
| Weights a run of peers is drawn at | 1 |

**A budget failing is a ranking question, never a permission to shrink something.** The fix is to
move a fact down the order or take it off.

## The names behind these rules

WCAG 2.2 for the floors a budget may never buy its way past — target size and focus visible.
Progressive disclosure, and Nielsen's aesthetic and minimalist design, for the tiering itself.