Logical model

Document status: draft. Canonical source.

The working NUIF model is a layered hybrid rather than a universal AST.

Identity

Every durable authored entity has a stable EntityId. Identity is independent from display names, containment position, serialization offsets, and vendor IDs. External correspondences are recorded separately as provenance.

Containment

Documents contain ordered authored entities. Containment expresses lifetime/ownership and author-facing hierarchy only.

Coordinated relations

Relationships that are not ownership belong in typed relation sets/graphs: component-instance links, token references, constraints, interactions, state transitions, dependencies, provenance, and extension-defined relations.

Authored and resolved data

Authored data expresses intent. Resolved data is derived for a named evaluation context such as viewport, scale, font environment, capability profile, and theme. Resolved data is cacheable/reproducible output and MUST NOT overwrite authored intent.

Extensions

The core admits namespaced extension values. An implementation may understand, preserve without understanding, approximate, or reject an extension according to declared capability and security rules.