Anatomy of a Native Essay · Terra Chartarum

This page is authored in MDX and rendered natively inside the portal shell — no iframe. It exists to show the three reusable islands in context. Copy starter/essay.mdx.template (or run npm run create-essay) to begin your own.

The meta-lens radar

The RadarChart island plots one or more series on shared axes, normalized 0–1. Pass a single series for an essay’s own scores, or several to overlay a comparison against the canonical meta-lens.

Hover a legend item to emphasize its series.

The adaptive timeline

AdaptiveTimeline compresses ancient centuries with the same square-root scale the cross-essay atlas uses, so a millennium-spanning essay stays legible. Events with an href become focusable links.

AD 1507 Waldseemüller world map AD 1569 Mercator projection AD 1973 GPS constellation begins

Three landmark maps, plotted on a compressed scale.

The compare slider

CompareSlider reveals one layer over another via clip-path, driven by pointer, touch, or keyboard (focus the handle and use the arrow keys). Drop images or SVG into the before and after slots.

Projection A

Projection B

Slide, or focus the handle and press ← / →.

That’s the whole toolkit. Everything above is server-rendered SVG/HTML; only the compare slider and the radar’s hover ship a few lines of vanilla JS. See the colophon for the meta-lens crosswalk these components visualize.