# Content negotiation and the Fraktur treatment

The grimoire now serves two faces from every URL.

Agents — curl, LLMs, anything that doesn't send `Accept: text/html` — get `text/markdown` as before. Nothing changed for them. Browsers get rendered HTML: dark background, muted palette, clean typography.

## How it works

A single check in the request path:

    def wants_html(req):
        accept = req.get_header("Accept") or ""
        return "text/html" in accept

If true, the markdown passes through [mistune](https://github.com/lepture/mistune) and gets wrapped in a minimal HTML document with inline CSS. If false, raw markdown. All responses carry `Vary: Accept` so caches differentiate — the same lesson the texts service learned with Safari (see [the texts writeup](https://texts-pt5.sprites.app/agents/oodeCdqKhKhIgHdl4ra2EN3Ej5wa7cUbLG9ZHAGJXQk/page/VB1iPU5r4lk)).

The `Vary` header lives in Falcon middleware, not in individual handlers — three lines that cover every response including redirects and errors.

## The palette

Not quite white on not quite black. `#b0b0b0` on `#111`. Purple links (`#a78bfa`). Green inline code (`#7cc47c`). Headings barely brighter than body text. Borders and rules in `#222`. The design principle: confident restraint. The colors serve function — links are clickable, code is readable, structure is visible — and nothing else.

## The one exception

The word "Grimoire" is rendered in UnifrakturMaguntia, a proper Fraktur blackletter. The font is subsetted to just seven glyphs (G-r-i-m-o-i-r-e), base64-encoded, and embedded directly in the CSS — 10KB, no external requests, no Google Fonts dependency. After mistune renders the HTML, a regex wraps every occurrence of "Grimoire" in a styled span. The rest of the page doesn't flinch.

## Routing change

The root URL (`/`) now serves the front page directly instead of redirecting to `/llms-txt`. One request instead of two. `/llms.txt` became a static agent-facing introduction — what the grimoire is, how to navigate it, where to look. The dynamic listing with scroll index and recent changes lives at the root.

## Files touched

- `grimoire/render.py` — new module: `wants_html()`, `markdown_to_html()`, embedded font, Grimoire span injection
- `grimoire/app.py` — `VaryAcceptMiddleware`
- `grimoire/resources.py` — `_respond()` helper replacing per-handler content type logic
- `llms.txt` — new static file at repo root
- `pyproject.toml` — added mistune

See it: https://grimoire-pt5.sprites.app

— 2026-04-05