Shimmer Vocabulary
A compact glossary for anchors, seeds, projection surfaces, and shimmerprints.
Core Vocabulary
ShimmeryMemory
The public memory substrate.
It stores canonical artifacts and exposes them as navigable, shimmer-capable objects.
Shimmer
The general tuning principle.
Shimmer is not a color palette, document mode, or single app.
Shimmer is portable stateful tuning across projection surfaces.Shimmer Lab
The workbench.
It loads shimmer-enabled surfaces, discovers their anchors, lets users tune them, and exports seeds and traces.
Shimmer Interface
The reader-facing semantic interface.
It applies the same tuning principle to essays, protocols, frameworks, glyphs, and meaning artifacts.
Shimmer Bridge
The opt-in adapter.
It lets a projection surface communicate with the Shimmer host.
Shimmer Manifest
The exposed anchor map.
It says:
Here are the things this surface consents to let Shimmer tune.The manifest is technical metadata, but it is also a consent boundary.
Anchor
A groomable point of variation.
In Shimmer v0.4, anchors are CSS variables. Later, anchors can be semantic scalars, glyph layers, protocol states, graph nodes, generated artifacts, or other transformation points.
Field Seed
The reversible encoded state.
A field seed returns you home.A seed contains enough information to restore a projection state.
Shimmerprint
The irreversible public trace.
A shimmerprint leaves a trace.A shimmerprint does not restore the field. It witnesses that a field state existed.
Projection Surface
Anything capable of interpreting a seed.
A projection surface may be:
- a website
- an essay page
- a glyph poster
- a protocol diagram
- a visual field
- a merch mockup
- a semantic graph
- a generated world
Projection
An interpretation of a seed, matrix, or state into a visible, semantic, symbolic, or interactive form.
Artifact
The stable source object.
The artifact remains addressable, canonical, and witnessed. It does not change just because a projection shimmers.
Attractor
The field-like center of meaning that an artifact may point toward.
The attractor is not identical to the artifact. It is inferred, approached, and traversed.
Shimmer State
A particular tuned posture of a projection surface.
In the visual lab, this may mean color, position, opacity, spacing, or atmosphere. In the semantic interface, this may mean formality, metaphor density, abstraction, symbol density, loop awareness, or reader assumptions.
Restorable Link
A URL that carries a field seed and restores a projection state.
Example pattern:
https://example.com/#shimmer=field:v1:<encoded-state>Canonical Distinctions
Field seed returns you home.
Shimmerprint leaves a trace.The artifact is the source.
The field seed is the path back to a view.
The shimmerprint is the witness mark.The artifact stays still.
The projection shimmers.Variables imply CSS.
Anchors imply generality.Lab: tune the projection.
Interface: tune the document.
Memory: preserve the artifact.Canonical Product Lines
Sites expose anchors. Shimmer tunes them. Seeds remember.A field seed returns you home. A shimmerprint leaves a trace.A site is a projection surface. Shimmer is the tuning instrument. The field seed is the portable state.Shimmer manipulates the seed. Projections interpret it. Sites embody it.Shimmer is not the sunset. Shimmer is how the sunset travels.Anything can become a seed. Not everything can return you home.Read the artifact. Tune the field. Carry the seed. Leave a trace.The Family
ShimmeryMemory preserves artifacts.
Shimmer exposes anchors.
The Lab lets you groom them into portable fields.
The Interface lets meaning shimmer without losing its source.