Quail Pages Documentation

Build websites with Quail Pages

Using an AI agent? Read llms.txt before traversing the documentation; it provides the site-authoring workflow, source-of-truth boundaries, and routes to authoritative contracts.

Quail Pages is an authored JSON website system for creating fast, static websites from a small, structured content model.

This documentation is itself a Quail Pages website. The Document pages are generated from the same JSON Schema that defines the Quail Pages authored contract.

The canonical site-building sequence is evidence first and implementation second: research → Site Discovery → content inventory and information architecture → sitemap and page decisions → imagery strategy → visual and theme direction → author site and pages → select or create theme → validate → build → review the rendered result against Discovery.

  • Author sites with structured JSON
  • Reuse content with components
  • Extend sites with plugins
  • Render everything to static HTML

Machine-readable contracts

Architecture

qp.architecture.json Defines how Quail Pages concepts are organized, names canonical responsive presentation-width ranges, and records keyless stylesheet infrastructure such as base.css.

Authoring Schema

qp.schema.json Defines what can be authored in Quail Pages, including document structures, elements, properties, constraints, and composition rules.

Style Guide Intake

qp.style-guide-intake.json Defines the evidence-first intake process for establishing, completing, or normalizing a brand into a durable Quail Pages style guide.

Style Guide

qp.style-guide.json Defines the canonical, normalized source of truth for a brand's visual identity and creative authority, used by downstream theme and site building.

Site Building Intake

qp.site-building-intake.json Defines the adaptive intake process for gathering the consequential organizational, audience, content, structural, and operational knowledge needed to build a site.

Site

qp.site.json Defines the provenance-aware declarative understanding of the site to build, separate from the style guide that governs its brand expression.

Class Contract

qp.classes.json Defines the stable classes, structural relationships, modifiers, states, and styling hooks emitted or managed by Quail Pages.

Base Theme Inventory

qp.theme.json Defines the authoritative Base theme variable architecture and enriches it with generated CSS definitions, consumers, properties, and source observations.

Theme Extension Schema

qp.theme-extension.schema.json Defines the sparse declaration format for theme overrides and theme-owned variable architecture; semantic remaps are inferred from exact references.

Theme Style Configuration Schema

qp.theme-style.schema.json Defines optional theme package metadata: a required stable ID plus optional display name and font-preload intent. Directory and style.css remain authoritative for discovery.

Icon Registry

icons.json Defines canonical icon names, human descriptions, discovery keywords, and renderer-owned SVG path geometry.

The site-authoring loop

Discovery establishes the starting truth; rendered review tests whether the implementation honored it.
  • Research and Discovery: orient to authoritative sources and existing identity; ask only when an answer can materially change what comes next.
  • Structure and content: inventory material, form the information architecture, then decide the sitemap and individual pages.
  • Imagery and direction: choose what images must communicate before selecting or creating a visual system.
  • Author and theme: compose with QP vocabulary, then extend Base with a shared or private site-local theme.
  • Validate, build, and review: generate reproducible output and compare the real responsive result with Discovery; correct the earliest owning source when it misses.

For existing sites, preserve authoritative content, assets, language, and visual identity unless the project explicitly authorizes a redesign or rebrand. Discovery seeks sufficiency, not completeness.