ekklesiaandClaude Opus 5
de5025ad22
Teachers prepare a lesson across several tabs — the lesson, its video,
the activity — and app mode is the one thing that cannot give them that.
Chrome cannot be asked for "tabs but no omnibox". App mode has no tabs; a
normal window has an address bar and no policy, flag or extension removes
it; tabbed web apps need a manifest on a site that is not ours and push
off-origin links out into a normal browser window, which is the whole of
what this design exists to prevent. So the tab strip is ours, and the
engine is Chromium either way.
QtWebEngine, from Debian, measured before it was chosen rather than
after. The usual and correct objection is codecs: on Debian 13 it reports
H.264, AAC, MP3, VP8 and VP9 all playable, MediaSource supports avc1,
mp4a and vp9, and a 720p H.264 file decoded and played to the end in the
lab. app.wonderink.org loads, and its sign-in is an ordinary email and
password form rather than a Google flow that would mind an embedded
browser. The user agent has the QtWebEngine token stripped so a site
gating on it sees the Chromium this actually is, and Widevine is handed
over from Chrome's own bundle when the machine has Chrome, which a
classroom always does.
[ Lesson ] [ Video ] [ Activity ]
The strip appears only above one tab, so an ordinary lesson looks exactly
like the application it replaces. A tab can only come from the lesson —
target=_blank, window.open, a middle click, a Ctrl+click — and there is
no address bar, no search and no button that makes a blank tab. No
allowlist of domains either, on purpose: a list would have to be right
about every video service a lesson might ever embed.
Three bugs the lab caught and this fixes. A lesson calling window.print()
did nothing at all, which is worse than no print button because a teacher
concludes the printer is broken; printRequested is now bound to the page
that asked. Leaving fullscreen left the window 200 pixels wide in the
corner — a window that has only ever been maximised has no ordinary
geometry to return to — so the fullscreen bit is cleared rather than
maximised being re-requested. And the Present view video failure written
up in docs/wonder-ink.md is acted on at last: that investigation named
the autoplay gesture chain as the likeliest cause and declined to fix it,
because in Chrome the only lever governed the ordinary browser as well.
Here it does not — this profile is Wonder Ink and nothing else — so a
lesson may start its own video and no other page in the room may.
Reproduced both ways in the lab with an unmuted video started by a script
with no gesture: NotAllowedError at Chrome's default, playing as shipped.
That is not proof Present view is fixed; the lab has no Wonder Ink
account, and candidates 2 and 3 in that document are still open.
Measured on a rebooted machine, from the package: tabs open from a link
and from window.open, switch, and close; closing one leaves the others;
closing the last closes Wonder Ink; H.264 video plays and fills the
display in fullscreen and comes back maximised with its tabs; the print
dialog offers the room's own Elmer queue; a download lands in ~/Downloads;
back and forward work from a right-click menu that is built rather than
filtered; pressing the panel button twice raises one window rather than
starting a second on the same profile; KWin reports the window as
ekklesia-wonderink, which is one panel button and not two.
Separate from the browser as before, in its own profile, with cookies
that live only as long as the window — what the Chrome policy did for
wonderink.org, and the reason closing Wonder Ink ends a teacher's
session. Chrome's old profile directory is left untouched beside it, and
the browser's own policy is not edited by any of this.
Wonder Ink is now optional per device, through WONDERINK_ENABLED in
device.conf, because one future device is a laptop that will not have it.
It rides the mechanism the disc player already uses: one marked line in
the packaged layout, edited by classroom-desktop-layout. False takes the
launcher off the panel and makes the command refuse to start; the
browser, Parent Call and the disc player are untouched and the panel
stays balanced. Absent means yes, so every existing room is unchanged.
One scale, still. Chrome has to be handed UI_SCALE because it was
measured not to follow the compositor; Qt does follow it — devicePixelRatio
2.0 at UI_SCALE=2.0, measured — so Wonder Ink is deliberately not told,
or the room would get it twice.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
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Screenshots from the classroom v2 experiment
All 1920×1080, captured with grim from a real running session in the
container lab. See ../classroom-v2-experiment.md.
The desktop
v2-idle-desktop |
the idle desktop: the wallpaper, one bar, nothing else |
v2-from-package |
the same desktop, produced by installing the .deb on a clean machine |
v2-dark-bar, v2-light-bar |
the bar in both themes |
v2-theme-compare |
the two, one above the other |
v2-testpage |
a maximised browser, edge to edge above the bar |
v2-wonderink |
Wonder Ink as an application, in its own profile |
Application state
state-1-closed |
both launchers closed: no indicator |
state-3-behind |
one active (teal), one running behind it (grey) |
state-4-minimized |
minimised — measured identical to behind, which is why minimise was removed as a route |
state-5-restored |
back |
v2-both-apps |
both applications, one button each, from the packaged install |
labelled-tasks |
the labelled task manager, evaluated and rejected: it shows changing page titles rather than application names |
Wonder Ink with tabs
0.2.1. A teacher prepares a lesson across several tabs, and none of a browser's other furniture is on the screen.
wonderink-tabs |
[ Lesson ] [ Video ] [ Activity ] — the second and third opened by the lesson itself, one through target=_blank and one through window.open |
wonderink-one-tab |
one tab, and no strip at all: the room looks exactly like the application this replaced |
wonderink-tab-closed |
the middle tab closed; the other two carry on |
wonderink-fullscreen |
a lesson's video over the whole display, panel and tab strip included |
wonderink-after-fullscreen |
and back, maximised above the bar, tabs intact — the bug this caught left the window 200 pixels wide in the corner |
wonderink-context-menu |
the whole of the right-click menu: back, forward, reload, print. No view-source, no save-page, no new window |
wonderink-print-dialog |
a lesson calling window.print(), landing on the room's own Elmer queue |
wonderink-and-browser |
the point of the split, in one picture: Chrome in front with its address bar, Wonder Ink a separate button beside it |
wonderink-autoplay, wonderink-autoplay-control |
the Present-view autoplay failure reproduced and then not reproduced: an unmuted video started by a script with no gesture, blocked at Chrome's default and playing as shipped |
wonderink-packaged |
the packaged shell against the real app.wonderink.org, launched from the .deb on a rebooted machine |
wonderink-disabled |
WONDERINK_ENABLED=false — no lesson button, the browser and the disc player where they were |
Parent Call
pc-icon-vs-notifications |
the Parent Call mark beside Plasma's notification bell — the comparison that decided it |
pc-mark |
the mark at 32, 48 and 64px, beside the two marks it replaced |
pc-panel |
the whole bar: Parent Call left, applications centre, status right |
pc-ready |
the card, ready, in approval mode |
pc-waiting |
waiting for a volunteer to approve |
pc-sent |
Sent to sanctuary — never "displayed" |
pc-rejected |
not approved, offering Try again |
pc-off |
the coordinator's mode is off |
pc-nobroker |
the broker is unreachable |
pc-typed |
a name in the field |
icon-candidates-2 |
sixteen Breeze person icons at real panel size, none of which meant Parent Call |
DVD
dvd-panel |
DVD in the row with the applications, out of the status area |
dvd-cover |
the DVD launcher's tooltip on the packaged install |
v2-dvd-overlay, v2-layershell |
the loading cover: a gtk-layer-shell overlay under KWin |
Windows
v2-secondary-window |
a window a page opened, floating over an untouched browser, with its own close button |
v2-print-dialog |
the system print dialog, over the page that raised it, offering only Elmer |
v2-fullscreen |
fullscreen video: the whole display, panel covered |
v2-layershell |
a gtk-layer-shell overlay under KWin — what the DVD loading cover is made of |
v2-notification-crop |
a notification card, top right |
Administration
admin-terminal |
the maintenance terminal, opened by its chord's action |
admin-terminal-bar |
the bar with the terminal open, and after closing it: a task button while it runs, no launcher ever |
Reliability and lockdown
recovery-after-8-kills |
the panel after eight consecutive SIGKILLs |
recovery-after-kwin-kill |
the session after KWin was killed twice; the application window survived |
recover-panel |
the bar rebuilt from the layout script after its configuration was deleted |
lock-desktop-rmb |
right-clicking the wallpaper: no menu |
lock-panel-rmb |
right-clicking the bar: no menu |
lock-krunner |
KRunner asked for, and not there |
The migration
migration-before |
what a real room got when it upgraded: stock Debian Plasma, kickoff, a pager, a system tray, the Debian wallpaper. Reproduced in the lab by taking one line out of the harness. |
migration-after |
the same machine after the fix — a Hyprland-era install, upgraded, rebooted |
migration-after-bar |
its bar, at the size a teacher sees it |
migration-parent-call |
Parent Call on the migrated machine, saying it cannot reach the church network rather than pretending it can |
theme-light-live, theme-light-after-logout |
the room's own light theme, and the same room after logging out and back in. The first attempt at this pass lost it. |
The rooms themselves
v2-from-package |
the classroom with the church's own wallpaper and the real Wonder Ink mark |
wonderink-icon |
the same mark as a running application's button |
display-settings |
the hidden display-size dialog, saying that saving needs an administrator |
scale-200, scale-200-notification, scale-200-chrome |
the room at 200%: the panel, a notification card, and the browser, all doubled together |
notification-style |
the notification card on the classroom's own Plasma style |
osd-volume |
Plasma's volume display, which the room keeps |
osd-shellpackage |
the custom one, which rendered correctly and cost the panel |
pc-unreachable, pc-not-configured |
Parent Call telling a broker it cannot reach from one that was never set up |
dvd-absent-bar |
the bar on a machine with no optical drive |
A morning in the rooms
pc-no-mode |
Parent Call ready against a broker with no retained mode — the state that used to say the room was never set up |
pc-bottom-left, pc-200-package |
the card anchored bottom-left at 100% and at 200% |
notif-package-100, notif-package-200 |
the notification card at both scales, from Classroom |
notif-13pt, notif-15pt |
the two font sizes that were weighed for it |
pc-typed-layer |
the card gone: the lab's keyboard tool closes it, which is why typing is still a bench test |
Failures, kept
| — | keyboard injection never reached the nested session, so every interaction in this experiment was driven by the pointer. It is why Parent Call has never had a real key pressed into it, and why that is the first bench test. |
m-closed, m-minimized |
the pair whose pixels were sampled to show that Plasma draws minimised and closed differently, but minimised and behind the same |