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product/history/marketing.md

Rendered from the repository — the file stays the source of truth.

Marketing site — project history

Status: Snapshot as of 2026-08-18, written by session C4. Covers apps/marketing through session C3 (PR #14). Later sessions append below rather than rewriting. Sources: PR descriptions, handovers/.

What was built

  • 2026-08-17 — Astro scaffold (PR #1): create-astro minimal template + Tailwind.
  • 2026-08-17 — The Marginalia landing page, session C1 (PR #7). A single static page, componentized (hero, grounded demo, how-it-works, audio, scope, CTA), shipping zero JavaScript. Screenshots (desktop 1440, mobile 375) committed under handovers/assets/.
  • 2026-08-18 — Legal pages, session C3 (PR #14). /impressum/ (§ 5 DDG) and /datenschutz/ (GDPR Art. 13) ahead of the B2 go-live, with /privacy as a static redirect alias and a <nav aria-label="Legal"> in the footer.

Decisions and why

  • The name: Marginalia — “notes in the margins of your sources”. Proposed in C1 as a placeholder and confirmed by the owner during the session; the footer’s working-title hedge was removed, and an explicit non-affiliation line (no Google / NotebookLM / Gemini association) stays on every public page. The infrastructure resource prefix was renamed to marginalia in the same wave, before Terraform’s first apply (PR #11).
  • A page that shows its work. The design direction applies the product’s grounding principle to the marketing itself: claims carry superscript citation chips resolving to a Footnotes section that links to the repo’s real product/scope.md and product/roadmap.md, and the hero holds a CSS-only demo where hovering/focusing a citation chip highlights the exact cited passage in the source cards (:has() + :target — no script). Zero JS keeps the static-bucket deployment trivial.
  • The visual identity (reused by the docs site): paper white #fafaf6, ink blue #17293b, one marker-yellow accent #ffe14d (the researcher’s highlighter); Newsreader (display), Public Sans (body), IBM Plex Mono (chips and labels), all self-hosted via fontsource — no runtime CDN, font, or script requests, verified by grepping dist/. Light theme only, on purpose.
  • Honest-copy constraints. Features are limited to the actual prototype scope; Audio Overviews are badged “in development” and limited to a single narrator; a “Small on purpose” section lists the cut list under “Not yet — and not pretended”. No testimonials, logos, pricing, ratings, or fabricated numbers; every CTA is a real link (repo or in-page anchor).
  • Bilingual legal pages on one URL each (session C3). German first (authoritative), English translation below, lang="de" on the German sections — one file per page per site to keep in sync, one canonical URL per document; /privacy exists only as a redirect. The Impressum data (name, address, email, phone, no VAT ID) was dictated verbatim by the owner in-session; nothing was invented. The privacy statement is deliberately short because it describes reality: fully static, no cookies, no tracking, no forms, self-hosted fonts, Scaleway Object Storage as the sole processor.
  • Accessibility floor (session C1): semantic landmarks, skip link, keyboard-reachable citation chips (real anchors), :focus-visible styles, prefers-reduced-motion disables all motion, and programmatically verified contrast — all text pairs ≥ 6.7:1.

Problems and how they were dealt with

  • Header anchors broke on subpages. The site was a one-pager, so nav links were bare #section anchors; adding /impressum/ and /datenschutz/ broke them from those pages. Found in C3 while adding the pages; fixed by making anchors root-relative (/#how-it-works) and pointing the logo at / (PR #14).
  • Legal content is mirrored, not shared. The same Impressum/privacy content exists in both static apps because the repo convention forbids cross-workspace imports and no shared packages/ package exists yet. Consciously accepted, with the future dedup path noted in the C3 PR.
  • The legal texts are a template, not legal advice. Drafted by an AI session from owner-supplied data; the surrounding legal wording awaits the owner’s (or a lawyer’s) review — recorded prominently in the PR and handover as an open item.
  • No “Open the app” CTA yet. The only honest CTA today is the repository; the C1 handover notes the hero should gain a real app link once the webapp ships under a real domain.

Where the marketing site stands

Live at the Scaleway bucket endpoint since B2’s deploy (PR #13), legally furnished, tracking-free. Open items: owner review of the legal texts, a webapp privacy statement when the webapp goes public (explicitly out of C3’s scope), and the app CTA.