§1 Introduction

Scope

Fireside defines a portable format for branching presentations and lessons. Documents are directed graphs whose nodes contain typed content blocks and traversal hints.

The protocol is renderer-agnostic and runtime-agnostic.

Conformance

A conforming engine for 0.1.0:

1. Parses and validates Fireside JSON documents.
2. Implements traversal semantics (Next, Choose, Goto, Back).
3. Renders all seven core block kinds.
4. Handles unsupported extension blocks via fallback behavior.

Design Principles

• Portability first
• Predictable traversal
• Minimal mandatory core
• Safe extensibility
• Accessibility-aware rendering intent

Terminology

Normative chapters use technical terms (Graph, Node, ContentBlock). Guides may use conversational aliases (Session, Moment, Block).

Wire Format Baseline

• UTF-8 JSON
• Kebab-case core property names
• kind as ContentBlock discriminator
• JSON Schema 2020-12 machine-readable contract