The Fireside Protocol

Version: 0.1.0

Fireside is a portable, implementation-independent format for branching presentations and lessons. Documents are directed graphs of nodes containing content blocks and traversal metadata.

Choose by Goal

Tutorial

Learn by building a complete session:

• Your First Fireside Session

How-to Guides

Solve specific authoring problems:

• Branching Adventures
• For Designers

Reference

Look up protocol definitions and schema details:

• Specification
• Graph schema
• Node schema
• Content blocks schema
• Domain vocabulary
• Data model quick reference

Explanation

Understand design rationale and tradeoffs:

• Design Decisions

Protocol Snapshot

• Wire format: kebab-case JSON properties
• Block discriminator: kind
• Core block kinds: heading, text, code, list, image, divider, container
• Extension block: kind: "extension" with explicit type
• Traversal operations: Next, Choose, Goto, Back
• Media type: application/json
• Schema dialect: JSON Schema 2020-12

Now that we have a specification, we can define and design engines that implement it. The next chapter defines normative traversal algorithms and state rules for Next, Choose, Goto, and Back operations.