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LoomWeaver

The address

This is a guide, not the contract. What the platform guarantees is specified under openspec/specs/. For this page: routing · content-tabs · containers · popout-windows. Where this page and a specification disagree, the specification is right, and that is a defect in this page: change the behaviour there, then explain it here.

This page explains what the browser’s address bar means in a workbench with several panes. The how-to pages linked at the end show the code.

Content has an address

Content in the main area has an address, so a link can be shared, the browser’s back and forward buttons work, and a reload returns the user to where they were. The platform owns the mechanics. The distribution sets up the router once (Content-area routing), and a routable surface becomes an ordinary route once plugins have activated. Links, route parameters and query parameters behave as they do anywhere in an Angular application. What an address means below its first segments belongs to the plugin that claimed it.

One pane carries it

With several panes open, exactly one is the address pane: the one whose content the address bar reflects. Focusing another pane moves that role to it and the address follows; it never rebuilds the pane. Navigating to a surface another pane already holds reaches it there instead of opening a second copy. Every navigation behaves the same whoever started it, a click, a deep link, browser history or a plugin’s own call.

What has no address

A surface docked in a sidebar has no address; a plugin that navigates it does nothing, with a warning in development. A pop-out window is a viewer onto one surface: it freezes the address it opened with and refuses content navigation, because there is nothing else in that window to navigate to. A kept surface is mounted off the router and sees only a fabricated route (Retention and unsaved work).

What the address does not carry

The address names the content and its parameters. It never carries the arrangement: which sidebars are open, how the panes are split, how wide they are. That is deliberate, and it is what makes a link worth sending: the recipient gets your content in their own workbench, not your window.

Two addresses that differ in a parameter are different content. doc/7 and doc/9 are two tabs with two states, and navigating between them is a real change rather than one instance being reused.

Inside a container

A container is a workspace in a tab, and a child inside it may carry a relative address: the child surface and a segment below it. The browser address then names the focused child, so deep links, back and forward and reload work inside the container as they do outside it.

Where to act on it