Specify cards for the reference quadrant's landing page

[bjlittle]

Amends narrative spec §3.9 so the reference quadrant's landing page takes a grid of cards, and brings four other specifications into line. Specification only — the plan and the build follow as their own pull requests, as the landing tables (#274/#275/#276) and What's New (#319/#320/#322) did.

Why the 2026-09-11 decision is reversed

It kept the reference quadrant out on two premises.

• "Its introduction names two of its six pages as editorial guidance rather than enumerating them." False when written. The opening paragraph had enumerated all six since Read a sounding either way: ship the Camborne pair and the how-to that uses it #210 — "Beside it sit the command line, every configuration option and its default, a glossary, the published sources this documentation cites, and the changelog" — and the two pages named as guidance were in the paragraphs after it. Add the What's New section #322 then extended that list by hand to seven, in the same commit as its toctree line: the drift §3.9 exists to close, on the page it had been declared absent from. Both read from git show rather than recalled.
• "Its entries are reached by name." Answered by a card rather than contradicted by one: a card is a named destination recognised by its icon, and its sentence separates the pairs that blur — What's New against Changelog, Command Line against Configuration Options.

§3.9 keeps the 2026-09-11 amendment as the record and adds a dated correction beneath it.

The shape, and what measured it

• .. grid:: 1 2 2 2, the API card leading at full width. Rendered in Chromium at 360, 600 and 1280px against three alternatives. Two columns at every breakpoint — the root page's .. grid:: 2 — broke words mid-word at 360px ("Configuratio / n"); three columns squeezed each sentence to four lines; seven cards in two columns leave an odd one out.
• Icons in the root page's vocabulary, dark twins by colour swap. The knock-out halo in dark is #14181e, the ground measured behind a card. The root page's #20242b leaves a visible ring there, so its dark Tutorials icon is corrected with them.
• A card raises no tooltip. tippy_skip_anchor_classes keeps sd-stretched-link; the tip is generated and never attached. So the table rule "a row's sentence is not the page's opening, because a hover shows it" does not carry over to cards — which I first got wrong by reading the generated payload, exactly the trap tooltip spec §3.3 records.
• The gate: CARD_SECTIONS beside TABLE_SECTIONS, the same four checks, and the API entry — which exists only while a build runs — derived by executing conf.py, as tests/test_docs_whatsnew.py does.

Also corrected in §3.9

The gate paragraph said tests/test_docs_landing_pages.py discovers the quadrant directories rather than listing them. It lists them, in constants, and discovers the pages.

Carried into four other specifications

spec	was	now
whatsnew spec §4	the reference quadrant is kept out of the landing shapes	What's New is one entry of the quadrant's landing page
contributor spec §7	the reference quadrant does not take the shape	it takes cards
start spec §6	the question narrative spec §7 holds open	settled 2026-09-11, refined 2026-09-15
tour spec	"No landing table, still" for developer/	superseded the day it was written — #306

The last is not about the reference quadrant; it is the same decision thread, stale since #306, and included at Bill's request.

Verification

On b47b843: tests/test_citations.py, tests/test_github_references.py and tests/test_docs_landing_pages.py — 80 passed; a fail-on-warning docs build, check_rendered_citations.py and check_documentation_links.py all pass; every hook passes on the five changed specifications. The fragment, 1c72a6a, passed the hooks at commit and renders in towncrier build --draft under Documentation.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01C79QePZ862i61EJodupwVT

[read-the-docs-community]

Documentation build overview

📚 tephpy | 🛠️ Build #34568650 | 📁 Comparing 1c72a6a against latest (e3c1efc)

  🔍 Preview build  

15 files changed · ± 15 modified

± Modified

• sg_execution_times.html
• gallery/plot_hodograph.html
• gallery/plot_parcel_analysis.html
• gallery/plot_sounding.html
• gallery/plot_sounding_comparison.html
• gallery/plot_tephigram.html
• gallery/sg_execution_times.html
• reference/changelog.html
• developer/specs/2026-08-27-narrative-quadrants-design.html
• developer/specs/2026-09-05-getting-started-design.html
• and 5 more...