Research coverage and continuous completeness

A research repository cannot truthfully claim to contain every paper that will ever be relevant. NUIF instead defines operational completeness: every planned architectural front must have an explicit status, evidence links, unresolved questions and an experiment/decision path.

research/coverage.yaml is the machine-readable coverage contract. It maps the founding research plan to research IDs, specification modules, RFCs/ADRs, code seams and experiments. The project can therefore identify gaps structurally rather than relying on prose search to infer that a topic was forgotten.

Current state

All founding fronts are represented. The resource, browser-capture, reconstruction-evaluation, adaptation/distillation and AI artifact-governance fronts are now explicit rather than hidden inside “serialization” or “inference.” Decisions that can safely be made from mature prior art are marked covered. Questions whose answer would be premature without an implementation are marked experiment-required. Areas whose evidence base will continuously evolve—prior art, adapters, reconstruction and data/model governance—remain ongoing by design.

This distinction is important: marking an open research problem as finished would be less rigorous than preserving it as a first-class graph node.

Additional boundaries from the final sweep

• WAI-ARIA and accessibility API mappings support a semantic-role/state layer distinct from platform-specific accessibility trees. The bounded nuif-web-accessibility-0 lowering now proves computed role/name/state agreement for one eleven-node fixture across pinned Chromium, Firefox and WebKit while retaining native-platform and behavior non-claims.
• KHR_interactivity provides contemporary precedent for portable, capability-aware behavior graphs rather than arbitrary scripts embedded in visual nodes. The smaller nuif-behavior-state-machine-0 sidecar now has exact Rust/Node traces for ordered guards, state, effects and explicit required/optional capability handling without claiming a final semantic schema. Its first wire experiment is one inert canonical-CBOR, content-addressed package resource: a Rust gate validates document binding and hostile cases while an independent Python ZIP reader checks exact container bytes. The attachment remains outside the canonical Document and never grants execution authority. A separate one-way web lowering maps the bounded effects through native activation, hidden and an ARIA status region; five events agree across pinned Chromium, Firefox and WebKit under one exact CSP-hash-authorized runtime without extending that evidence to native UI or screen-reader speech.
• ReverseORC and related layout-inference work show that multiple viewport observations materially improve recovery of responsive intent.
• Screenshot-to-code research continues to show that visual reconstruction is not equivalent to recovering authored layout or behavior.
• Merkle/content addressing is appropriate for immutable assets and snapshots but not for editable semantic identity.
• EPUB OCF and OCI descriptors support a narrow manifest-driven package with size/digest verification; NUIF now has an in-repository independent-writer fixture. A three-OS CI matrix now exercises the package, image and font gates, while successful hosted evidence and external reproduction remain open.
• OpenType and Fontations evidence now supports one executable static TrueType package baseline with a pinned HarfBuzz metadata oracle. The retired ttf-parser decision remains documented; broad font formats, portability outcomes and shaping/raster integration remain experiment-required. Warmed parser and packaged-validation allocation ceilings cover every accepted fixture.
• Browser source capture and screenshot reconstruction are different evidence lanes and cannot share a blanket lossless claim.
• Current screenshot-to-code work supports OCR/region/hierarchical and render- correction experiments, not a claim that authored UI recovery is solved.
• LoRA, quantized adaptation and distillation are conditional experiment techniques; evaluation, rights-cleared traces and artifact governance precede training.

The continuous-research process should periodically re-run topic searches, append or supersede research records, and update research/coverage.yaml only when new evidence or experiments change the status of a front.

Canonical source.