Sightmap Glossary: Views, Components, Coverage Tiers, and More

Terms used throughout the Sightmap docs and spec, listed alphabetically.

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Audit

A review of .sightmap/ against the running app and source code to find stale routes, missing components, invalid selectors, and outdated memory.

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Bootstrap

The initial creation of a project’s .sightmap/ directory. An agent or human uses the sightmap CLI against the running app, proposes views and components, and verifies the resulting YAML. See the authoring workflow.

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Capture

One snapshot of a view. New captures added to a view set are stored at .sightmap/snapshots/{view}/{stamp}.snap, with the raw component tree in a sibling .snap.tree.json file. See Snapshots.

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Collector

The session-lifetime CDP client the browser start daemon runs to buffer console messages and network requests from every tab. The console and network commands read its bounded ring buffers.

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Component

A named DOM subtree identified by one or more CSS selectors. Components can be global at the file root or scoped inside a view. See Components.

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Component query

A query language for targeting components by name, descendant relationships, and extracted property values, such as ProductCard[name^="Weber"] or Ancestor Descendant. sightmap browser click, fill, hover, and scroll accept a query instead of a probe ID. The CLI extracts and matches the live tree immediately before the action, which reduces reliance on stale IDs. Resolution and the action are separate operations, so a later re-render can still invalidate the target. See Interaction.

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Conformance

The requirements a Sightmap implementation must follow. The JSON Schema and normative spec text define the contract; the language-agnostic conformance fixtures test defined behavior. See Conformance.

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Consumer

A tool acting in the reader role: it loads a sightmap and applies it to the running app without deciding what the corpus should contain. The same tool can also support the Curator role. See Curator vs. consumer.

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Corpus

The views, components, requests, and memory produced by loading and merging a project’s sightmap files. validate, lint, and search load the directory as a corpus. Coverage commands re-match saved captures against that corpus. See the Go library.

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Coverage tiers

The classification the CLI assigns to each analyzed interactive node. T1 direct means the node matched a component selector. T2 scoped means the node is unnamed but has a matched ancestor. T3 orphaned means the node has no matched ancestor. Coverage counts visible nodes by default. See Coverage.

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Curator

A human, an agent, or both working together to author and maintain .sightmap/. Curators choose names and selectors, write memory, and update the corpus as the app changes. Contrast with Consumer.

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MCP

Model Context Protocol, a protocol for exposing tools and context to agents. Sightmap does not require MCP; consumers can load its YAML files through any transport.

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Memory

Short freeform notes attached at the file root or to a view, component, or request. Memory records runtime context that source code may not state, such as quirks, invariants, and workarounds. See Memory.

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Novelty gate

The rule applied when capture appends to a view set. The first capture is kept; later captures are kept only when they add a matched component type or uncovered interactive slot. Changes to values such as products, prices, or copy do not count. sightmap capture --force bypasses the gate. See Snapshots.

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Project semver

The SemVer version assigned to the spec project, currently 0.1.0 in the canonical versioning policy. It is independent of both the spec stream in a sightmap file and the shipped CLI version. The current CLI/npm release is 0.13.1; sightmap version prints the installed CLI version. See Versioning policy.

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Request

A named API endpoint with a route glob and optional method filter, payload fields, headers, source path, description, and memory. Defined under requests:. See Requests.

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Selector

A CSS selector (or array of alternatives) that locates a component’s root element. Child selectors are scoped to the matched parent’s subtree. See Selectors.

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Session

The running Chrome instance owned by a browser start daemon, recorded in .sightmap/.session. It is the only way to launch Chrome for Sightmap; every live command attaches to it. A session may hold several tabs. See Browser sessions.

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Sightmap (the file)

A corpus YAML document under .sightmap/ that conforms to the stream 1 schema. Depending on context, “a sightmap” can also mean the full directory.

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.sightmap/ (the directory)

The .sightmap/ directory at the project root. Sightmap discovers and merges corpus *.yaml and *.yml files recursively. The Go loader skips the snapshots/ and review/ subdirectories because they hold non-corpus artifacts.

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Stream version

The integer in a sightmap file’s version field, currently 1. It selects the spec stream used to interpret the file and changes only for a breaking change to the YAML format. It is independent of project SemVer. See Versioning policy.

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Tab

A live browser page in a session, identified by the --tab ID printed by browser start. Distinct from a sightmap view: a tab is a running page; a view is a route-scoped definition in the corpus. When two or more tabs are open, page commands require --tab to avoid cross-agent crosstalk.

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View

A named screen identified by a URL route glob. Sightmap matches the current URL to one active view. A view is a corpus definition, not a live browser tab. See Views.

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View set

All saved captures for one view. coverage reports T1/T2/T3 for each capture and evaluates component presence across the set. report aggregates the set into one row, while multi-coverage uses the highest component count found in the set. See Snapshots.