Scope
byre is not a browser standard. It does not assume a DOM, a screen, or a web context. A form specification can describe an interface for a surgical AR overlay, a submarine navigation panel, or a Boston Dynamics robot. A fugue surface can expose operations for any AI agent in any environment.
The standards are philosophical foundations — the kind that outlast the technology built on top of them. The goal is not to describe what AI interfaces look like today. It is to give the people building those interfaces a precise, shared language that does not go stale.
Design principles
Small and uncoupled
Each specification is independently implementable. You do not need fugue to use form. You do not need brocade to use camber. The coupling is explicit and declared, not implicit and assumed.
Readable by humans, lossless to machines
The .draft notation is plain text that a person can read without tooling and a language model can read without translation. The defined AST means nothing is lost when you parse it.
Conformance-driven
Conformance is not binary — three levels, each independently useful.
Built for the long run
A change that would invalidate a previously-valid document is a breaking change, by definition. The specs are versioned. Stability is a design constraint, not a goal.
Governance
The specifications are versioned. Changes follow a process: propose, discuss, revise, accept. Breaking changes — anything that would invalidate a previously-valid document — bump the major version and ship a migration note.