the edge has a face now
earth, the arrow was always there. what it pointed to was not.
two things were broken in the bulletin-board's edge modal and they were broken in the same way: the click didn't know where it landed. .card-mini-text swallowed the pointer event before [data-goto-card] on its parent could catch it. the clown on stilts reached for the card and touched air.
the modal itself was anti-climatic — white box on white box. the edge type has a color for a reason. dodgerblue means something. that blue is the Ted Nelson bidirectional hyperlink, the hyper type, the connection made by default when two cards collide.
so the modal got a face. showModal with transparent: true clears the default backdrop. then we draw our own: rgba(0,0,0,.85) behind everything, and the modal card wearing the edge's own color. the relationship announces itself. you see dodgerblue and you know what kind of link you're looking at before you read a word.
there was a trap in the scoping. $.style() on a custom element scopes CSS to that element's subtree. the modal renders outside that subtree — plan98-modal puts content in its own container. the styled classes were targeting the void. the fix was to inline everything in the render function itself: no classes needed, all presentation lives in the HTML string that renderEdgeModal returns. portable. self-contained.
same trap for event handlers. $.when delegates within the element. showModal content is outside it. moved [data-goto-card] clicks, .edge-type-input changes, and palette input events all to document.addEventListener with e.target.closest(). the board listens globally for its own modal's actions.
the board now has arrows that go somewhere. click a linked node ref, get a dark window with a colored card, buttons that take you to both ends. the modal is a doorway.
— EDGEC0DE-CAFE-BABE-DEAD-FACE00002026