What is this site made of, and why does it look like this?

Half of what is published here is documented operating-system behaviour and half is somebody’s claim about it. A reader who cannot tell those apart learns nothing, so the design carries exactly one job: you can tell what kind of sentence you are reading before you read it. Prose in sans is documented mechanism or our own reasoning. Mono in a bordered card is something a vendor, a forum or a roundup asserted. Mono on a shaded strip is a measurement, a key path or an API name. Nothing decorative is coloured, because colour is a verdict, never a mood.

Working Set is the reference a person reads before they read a review, and the whole of the visual system exists to make that possible at a glance.

§1Type

Two faces from one superfamily, and nothing else. IBM Plex Sans at 400 and 600 sets the body, the headings and the wordmark; it was drawn for technical documentation and it is the only weight range on the site — nothing above 600 appears anywhere. IBM Plex Mono at 400 and 600 sets claim cards, cost lines, figures, key paths, verdict codes, section numerals, table headers, and every artifact name in running prose, at 11 to 14 pixels only, with tabular numerals always on.

Stated accurately, because it is a fact about what your browser is doing: the stylesheet names those two families first and falls back to the platform’s own system faces. No font file is fetched from a third-party origin on any page of this site, and no font file is served from ours at launch. Readers with IBM Plex installed see IBM Plex; everyone else sees their system UI face and its monospace companion, at the same sizes, with the same measure. Nothing about the meaning of the page depends on which one renders.

The typographic signature is entity marking. Every artifact named anywhere in running prose is set in mono inline, without exception: company names as filed, product names, file names, registry paths such as HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management, service short names, statute citations, case citations. Our prose is sans; the world’s objects are mono. A reader can see, without reading, how much of a paragraph is our narration and how much is a name that can be looked up.

The body is 17.5px on desktop and 16.5px on mobile, at a 68-character measure. Headings are flush left, never centred, and are complete questions or complete falsifiable statements — never a bare noun. Every second-level heading carries a mono section numeral in the structural blue, hung in the margin on wide screens and set above the heading on narrow ones, so every section has a stable anchor to deep-link to.

§2Palette

Nine tokens, two colour schemes, and every one of them is either structure or a verdict. There is no accent colour, no brand colour and no colour used for emphasis. Verdict colours never appear in an image, and image inks never appear in the interface, so a reader always knows whether they are looking at an argument or at a picture.

The colour is never the whole message. Beside each six-pixel square the code itself is spelled out in ordinary text, so a reader who cannot distinguish the hues, or who has printed the page in grey, or whose screen reader announces it aloud, gets the same verdict everyone else gets. Those codes live in the markup rather than being drawn by the stylesheet, because text a stylesheet invents cannot be reliably selected, copied or announced.

§3Measured contrast, and the correction that produced these numbers

Recomputed independently on 2026-08-05 from WCAG 2.1 relative luminance, against both background surfaces, in both colour schemes.

The first version of this table was wrong, and four tokens moved as a result. It reported ratios against the page background only, and claimed 7.0:1 for --meta where the true figure was 6.53:1. Re-measuring against the second surface — where every claim card and every cost line actually sits — failed three tokens outright: --meta at 6.02, --signal at 6.94 and --true at 6.91. The corrected values below clear 7:1 on all four surface and scheme combinations. Fixing that before launch rather than at the launch gate is the entire point of a site that audits other people’s claims, and it is recorded on /corrections/ as well as here.

Every foreground token clears 7:1 on every surface in both schemes, which is deliberately stricter than the 4.5:1 floor. The reason is specific rather than virtuous: verdict codes are set at 11 to 12 pixels, and a verdict at 4.5:1 is a verdict some readers cannot read. --hair draws hairlines and never sets a single character of type, at any size; its two figures are printed below so you can check that rather than take our word for it.

Links are the structural blue with a one-pixel underline, thickening to two on hover and focus. Visited links drop to the metadata grey and keep the underline. Focus outlines are two pixels at two pixels of offset and are never removed.

§4Image policy

There are no screenshots on this site and there never will be. We cannot make our own, we may not republish the previous owner’s, and a fabricated screenshot of Windows Winset would be a misrepresentation rather than a stylistic choice. The full argument, and what a diagram gives a reader that a capture never did, is at /no-screenshots/.

Prohibited outright in any image on this site: window chrome, title bars, menu bars, buttons, progress bars, dialog boxes, cursors, checkmarks, shields, locks, gauges, speedometers, brooms, wrenches, rockets, sparkles, glowing blue anything, photorealistic hardware, circuit-board photography, people, hands, desks, and any composition that could be mistaken at thumbnail size for a screen capture. Also prohibited across the interface: rounded corners, box shadows, gradients other than the section divider, icons other than the six-pixel verdict square, pill buttons, hero text overlays, author avatars, reading-time estimates and excerpt teasers.

Diagrams inside articles are hand-authored inline SVG, never images. Two inks, real selectable text, translatable, recoloured for dark mode from the page’s own custom properties, and under two kilobytes each. Anything longer than a word or two goes in the caption underneath instead, because a caption can be highlighted, run through a translator, spoken by a screen reader, and fixed later without anyone having to redraw the picture.

§5How an article hero is made, and the gate it has to pass

One hero per article, never repeated, never decorative inside the body, at a fixed 5:2 crop with explicit width and height. Each one is a one-plane orthographic cutaway of a single mechanism, and every one of them contains exactly one boundary: a two-pixel dashed vertical line in the structural blue at 38% of the frame width, running full height, in every image without exception. Across the slate that same line marks user mode against kernel mode, RAM against disk, in-use against available, reported against occupied, running against registered, what the vendor said against what the API does, and Windows against Linux. Same line, different systems, which is why a dozen of them read as one publication. The boundary is always labelled by the HTML caption and never by the image.

Heroes are generated. The house style is abstract, textless and schematic precisely so that plausible fake user interface is not something the prompt can produce, and every generated hero is inspected against a five-check gate before it is committed. A single failure means regenerate, never retouch.

The mechanism is generated; the frame and the boundary are not. The image model draws the subject from a written brief, and that drawing is never altered afterwards — a hero that fails the gate is redrawn from a revised brief, not corrected. But the model will not honour the two rules that make a dozen images read as one publication: asked for a 5:2 banner it returns a square every time, and asked for the boundary at 38% it has put the line anywhere between 43% and 65%. So the drawing is trimmed to its own content box, scaled to sit inside the 5:2 frame with margins — nothing is ever cropped away — and the dashed boundary is then drawn by us, at exactly 38%, identically in every image. The boundary is this publication’s own fixed device rather than part of any drawing, which is why authoring it is not the retouching that check 4 forbids. It is recorded here so the distinction is on the record rather than in a script nobody reads.

• Check 1 No window chrome, title bar, menu, button, dialog, cursor, progress bar or scrollbar. Anything that reads as captured interface at thumbnail size is rejected. reject
• Check 2 No lettering of any kind. Bare tabular numerals only. Generated type is unreliable, unselectable and untranslatable, and this domain’s readers arrive in nine languages. reject
• Check 3 Two inks only, --body and --signal on --page. A verdict colour inside an image is a rejection on its own. reject
• Check 4 The drawing carries no dashed line of its own, and reads correctly either side of 38% of the frame width, where our boundary will fall. reject
• Check 5 Flat and orthographic. No perspective, shading, gradient, glow, texture, photorealism, people or hands. It should look drafted, not rendered. reject

The fallback. If three attempts on one article fail the gate, that hero falls back to hand-authored SVG in the identical style, and the fallback is recorded on this page by name. It is the exception path, not the plan, and listing it here means the exception cannot become the quiet norm.

Heroes currently shipping as the SVG fallback, as of 2026-08-06: one of twelve. Is Windows 10 better than Linux, or is it the other way round? fell back on 2026-08-06. Three generations put the boundary through the middle of the left-hand group, which on that article would have drawn one operating system as larger than the other — the one thing its argument cannot afford. The replacement is hand-authored in the identical style: two rows of six identical blocks, matched to the pixel, one row each side of the line. The other eleven heroes are generated.

§6Zero third-party requests, on every page, forever

Loading any page on this site issues requests to tlwinset.com and to nothing else. There is no analytics script, no tag manager, no font CDN, no embedded video, no social widget, no share button, no comment system, no advertising slot, no consent banner and no cookie. There is no JavaScript at all — not a line, on any page, in any deploy. The site renders and is fully navigable with scripting disabled and at a 320-pixel viewport, because a meaningful share of this audience browses that way and will check.

There is also no build step and no framework. Every page is hand-written HTML served as a static file, with one stylesheet at /s.css. The budgets we hold ourselves to: under 22 KB for the front page including its stylesheet, under 115 KB for a complete article page including its hero, at most 60 KB for a generated hero or 14 KB for an SVG fallback, at most 2 KB for an inline diagram, and at most 9 KB for the stylesheet itself. The Ledger is deliberately outside the article budget and has its own, 40 KB compressed: it is one table of every row on the site rather than an article, it carries no hero, and splitting it across pages to hit a number set for articles would make it worse at the only job it has.

What this site can still see about its readers is Cloudflare’s server-side request numbers, and nothing beyond them. That is set out in full on /privacy/.

The favicon is the boundary mark alone: a dashed vertical line in the structural blue at 38% of the canvas, one solid node to its left and one hollow node to its right. It carries no text, it reads at 16 pixels, and it is the same figure that appears in every hero. It ships as SVG with a 32-pixel PNG beside it, because a browser that will not take the vector should still get the mark rather than a blank square.

§7How the writing is produced

Drafting on this site is AI-assisted. Every factual claim is checked against a primary source by a named human before publication, and that human is Working Set. No article makes a personal-use claim about any product, because nobody here has used one. The header block on every page carries the line WE RAN IT — No. before the first sentence of the page for the same reason.

What that means concretely: a sentence about how Windows behaves is sourced to Microsoft’s own documentation with the date it was read; a sentence about what a product claimed is in the past tense with an archive URL and a capture date, capped at 25 words; and a sentence we could not establish says so where a reader would otherwise assume we know. The three classes are OBSERVED, CLAIMED and UNDETERMINED, they are carried by sentence construction rather than by a disclaimer, and there is no fourth class.