Engineering

The product boundary

A general simulator would have to accept arbitrary topology, implement interacting state machines, model vendor divergence, and prove that outcomes match equipment. That validation surface is larger than the teaching job. The decision is recorded as docs/adr/0001-teaching-tool-not-simulator.md.

Every walkthrough is an ordered list of authored operations. The visualization engine folds those operations into frames. The UI never infers a next state from a topology the author did not write.

Standards integrity

RFC citations resolve against a committed cache. A section number that does not exist fails CI. IEEE clauses are cited by identifier; they do not pretend to live in the RFC Editor index. Proprietary protocols carry an honest block naming the vendor and the documentation that exists, instead of a fake RFC.

Embed package

@protocol-atlas/embed returns an iframe pointing at a protocol figure with?embed=1, which hides chrome. This page demonstrates it against the BGP best-path walkthrough:

Deploy

The app is a static export. deploy/Dockerfile builds it into nginx. Live lab or public DNS is a separate safety-gated step; this repository does not push itself to 192.168.4.210 or to production.

Public hosting decision: Vercel, matching alexflux.com — docs/adr/0005-public-host-vercel.md.