Prototype Council v6

Canonical source: docs/prototypes/v6/COUNCIL-v6.md · Snapshot commit: b9f2813f22e4

v6 Product Council contract — Private Search State

Date: 2026-08-14

Feature package: PVA-001

Candidate version: v6

Requirements: LID-REF-003, LID-OPS-008, LID-OPS-016

Starting point: v5 at f74455f

Status: approved for implementation; acceptance remains subject to independent QA

Product Manager decision

The audit identified an immediate privacy defect: v5 serializes a personal search term into ?q=, where browser history, referrers, reverse-proxy access logs, and other infrastructure could observe it. v6 closes only that self-contained defect and establishes an honest initial Search state. It does not claim to complete the broader lexical Search requirement.

Acceptance requires all of the following:

1. no search-term read or write in URL parameters, history.state, document title, local storage, or session storage;
2. a term exists only in live JavaScript memory and is cleared by reload;
3. internal navigation and Back/Forward preserve that live-memory term while the page remains open;
4. any incoming legacy q parameter is ignored and stripped immediately;
5. the initial screen contains a plain scope explanation and no personal suggestions, recent-memory content, or generated answer;
6. clearing Search removes the live value and returns focus to the input;
7. all v5 surfaces remain available without regression.

UI/UX Designer decision

Search becomes a calm, text-led archive index within the established warm-paper visual language.

• The editorial heading is smaller than v5 so the visible form and scope remain dominant.
• The label is Words or exact phrase; the action is Search archive.
• The initial state is headed Search without guesswork and explains private page-local state, current-scope limitations, and the absence of AI or image search.
• No suggested terms or recent Journal Days appear before a search.
• Result imagery remains orienting and contains no source/provenance overlay.
• Search metadata uses the 13 px functional floor.
• Compact layouts stack the form and explanatory rows without horizontal scrolling.
• Submit moves focus to the result count; Clear returns focus to the search field.

The complete match-level result design—date and exact-tag filters, photo captions, Include history, field/source snippets, index states, and historical destinations—remains approved for the later dependency-complete Search version.

Project Manager gate

The candidate must not be frozen or described as accepted until a fresh QA agent checks:

• static syntax and privacy-oriented source inspection;
• incoming legacy-query stripping;
• submit, no-result, clear, internal navigation, browser Back/Forward, and reload behavior;
• generic title and clean URL/history state throughout;
• desktop and compact visual states;
• keyboard focus behavior and v5 smoke regression;
• current-run screenshots and a written QA disposition.

Any failure is repaired in the same v6 candidate. The version number changes only after the candidate passes.

Council boundary

This version is frontend interaction evidence using fictional fixtures. It cannot prove deployed HTTP cache headers, proxy and CDN logs, telemetry retention, backend query handling, or server-side encryption. Those requirements remain implementation-unverified even when their product-facing state is represented.