Journal 2025-05-18

Front-end Joys

Trestle is the latest incarnation of my browser-based outliner, formally known as Trellis. It's heavily influenced by Workflowy, a great online tool I've been using on & off for years.

But the idea is that it's simply Yet Another view of RDF data in a SPARQL store. It just happens to focus on tree-shaped stuff.

Trellis had gone stale so I updated it a few months back. Decided to rename #:trestle because it did sound rather like Trello, which is in a similar space. I swapped out a heap of JQuery based code for more recent vanilla JS, totally rebuilt the architecture (now solidly MVC with added #:evb, my minimal event bus).

Right now it only captures root + parent-child relationships (with the children indexed to make the RDF easier). I want to add typing on nodes, a very-soon use case being sorting out my TODOs, using terms from the project vocab I threw together 20 years ago.

But before that, there was a bunch of little UI bits I hadn't implemented. Hamburger menu, breadcrumbs etc.

I thought this would be a quick job with AI. Nah. Took several hours with little progress. Interestingly 3 different LLMs got themselves stuck in the exact same create-break-fix-no-fix-no... loop (Claude Sonnet, GPT-4.1 & SWI-1, whatever that is, in Windsurf formerly Codium).

But I found it educational, I don't really do proper front-end stuff very often. GPT-4.1 had me poking around for computed layout bits, posting code into the browser console.

This does seem like an obvious job for MCP. I did have a quick look at a server for Puppeteer the other day but couldn't get it working. I mentioned it to danbri, he found Chrome Debug MCP and Chrome MCP. Next time.