Component Naming

Design: naming the components

Status: landed (2026-09-15). An audit of the component tags against the symbols they represent, the rule that came out of it, and the renames it called for — all executed in one pass, once the code was quiet enough: the package is @enumeratio/frontend, every tag in §4 has its kebab-cased symbol name, the class names follow, and the multiplexing question (§5) is answered in components-and-symbols.md §4 — a family tag stays a family tag, mirrored by a family head. The audit is kept as the record of why.

1. The problem

The tags grew one at a time and none of them was chosen against the symbol it stands for. Three separate inconsistencies fell out.

Compound symbols lost their word boundary. DensityPlot became notatio-densityplot, not notatio-density-plot. The tag reads as if the symbol were Densityplot, which is not a thing. Same for contourplot, polarplot, vectorplot, graphplot, plot3d.

Two components are named for the wrapper rather than the symbol. notatio-input and notatio-output describe what they are made of — a field, a rendering — where In and Out are what they are, and are what the elements already print in their own row labels.

The package disagreed with the docs. @enumeratio/elements shipped things the reference called components, because element is overloaded here — a group element, a basis element, a matrix element. The docs were moved to "components" first; the package followed.

2. Prior art

Every name below is a real `System`` symbol, checked against a kernel rather than remembered:

In, Out, Notebook, Manipulate, Plot, Plot3D, ContourPlot, DensityPlot, PolarPlot, VectorPlot, StreamPlot, GraphPlot, TreeGraph, LayeredGraphPlot, Dendrogram, ComplexPlot, MatrixPlot, ListPlot, DiscretePlot, BarChart, Histogram, PieChart, BoxWhiskerChart, TeXForm, Grid, Row, Column.

Worth noticing: In and Out are not an exception to a symbol-alignment rule, they are an instance of it. So is Notebook. The components that look least like symbols today are among the ones with the cleanest symbol to take.

3. The proposed rule

A component that represents a symbol is named notatio- + that symbol in kebab-case. A component that represents no symbol keeps a descriptive name, and we say so out loud.

Kebab-casing a symbol needs one wrinkle spelled out: a digit and the letters attached to it are one token, so Plot3D is plot-3d, not plot3-d.

4. The audit

Renamed (all landed)

Was	Symbol	Now
notatio-input	In	notatio-in
notatio-output	Out	notatio-out
notatio-plot3d	Plot3D	notatio-plot-3d
notatio-listplot3d	ListPlot3D	notatio-list-plot-3d
notatio-barchart3d	BarChart3D	notatio-bar-chart-3d
notatio-contourplot	ContourPlot	notatio-contour-plot
notatio-densityplot	DensityPlot	notatio-density-plot
notatio-polarplot	PolarPlot	notatio-polar-plot
notatio-vectorplot	VectorPlot	notatio-vector-plot
notatio-graphplot	GraphPlot	notatio-graph-plot
notatio-curve3d	—	notatio-curve-3d

Class names went with them: NotatioIn, NotatioOut, NotatioPlot3D, NotatioCurve3D, NotatioListPlot3D, NotatioBarChart3D (a digit-and-letters token is one token, so 3D not 3d). Playground pages carry the tag's slug (/playground/plot-3d), and the reference routes follow the tag as they always did.

Already aligned

notatio-plot (Plot), notatio-manipulate (Manipulate), notatio-notebook (Notebook), notatio-complex-plot (ComplexPlot).

notatio-complex-plot is the one rename that has happened. It was the clearest case — the component domain-colours a complex-valued expression over the plane, which is what ComplexPlot is, while "portrait" named the picture rather than the operation — and it came with a reworking of that component rather than as a rename on its own, which is the cheap way to do these: fold the new name into whatever work already touches the file.

Represents no single symbol

Component	Why
notatio-cell	an In/Out pair — though Cell is a Wolfram symbol (a notebook cell), so this row is closer to aligned than it looks
notatio-worksheet	ours; named expressions and a shared view
notatio-code	a source box; the language is an attribute
notatio-terminal	a REPL surface
notatio-figure	eleven glyph kinds behind one kind attribute (see below)
notatio-tex	retired: <notatio-out inline format="latex"> renders prose math now

5. The glitches worth indexing

These are the reasons this is a design note and not a sed invocation.

A component can multiplex several symbols. Four do, and the symbol is chosen by an attribute rather than by the tag:

Component	Attribute	Symbols behind it
notatio-chart	type	BarChart, Histogram, PieChart, BoxWhiskerChart, MatrixPlot, ListPlot, DiscretePlot
notatio-graphplot	type	GraphPlot, TreeGraph, LayeredGraphPlot, Dendrogram
notatio-vectorplot	type	VectorPlot, StreamPlot
notatio-figure	kind	eleven glyphs, most of which have no symbol at all

So "one component, one symbol" is already false, and renaming notatio-graphplot to notatio-graph-plot picks one of its four symbols to be the name. Either that is fine — the tag names the family and the attribute selects within it — or those components should split, which is a much larger change than a rename. This is the actual decision; the kebab-casing is the easy part.

The tag is a URL in two places. Reference pages are generated per tag (/reference/components/notatio-densityplot), and the playground page is matched by slug. Renames move both, and notatio-plot-3d would want /playground/plot-3d.

Class names carry their own drift. NotatioPlot3d (not …3D), NotatioTex (not …TeX). Worth settling in the same pass as the tags.

notatio-curve3d arrived after this note was started, spelled the old way — which is the argument for settling the rule rather than fixing tags one at a time. Wolfram's nearest symbol is ParametricPlot3D, which is not what it does; the name is ours, and curve-3d is the kebab rule applied to a name with no symbol behind it.

notatio-sheet already became notatio-worksheet without a note. Whatever rule comes out of this should say what a component is called when it represents nothing in Wolfram — otherwise the next one drifts the same way.

6. How it was done

One pass, 2026-09-15: the package rename (@enumeratio/elements → @enumeratio/notatio, packages/elements → packages/notatio; since 2026-09-27 @enumeratio/frontend, with notatio-lit now @enumeratio/components), the tags of §4, the class names, the playground page slugs — a scripted textual rewrite over the repo with the tag, class and route maps, plus git mv for the files, then a build and the site. The multiplexing question was answered first (family tags stay; see components-and-symbols.md §4), which is what made the rest mechanical. The one thing to watch for in a rename like this is a CSS class that shares a tag's name — the In label's class was notatio-in, and became notatio-in-label to match notatio-out-label.

The rule for what arrives next: a new component is named for its symbol on the day it is written, kebab-cased, and a family component keeps the family's name with the member in an attribute.