dither-ork documentation
A browser image ditherer. It opens a picture, runs it through a stack of effects, and writes the result. Everything happens in the tab — no upload, no account, no server round trip.
This site is the project's documentation. It is generated from the repository on every push to main, from the same files a contributor reads in the tree.
Where the app runs
The app is at https://dither-ork.pages.dev, on Cloudflare Pages. It is not here and it cannot be.
GitHub Pages serves no custom response headers. The renderer's WASM core is built with +atomics, so its linear memory is shared, so it needs SharedArrayBuffer — and a browser exposes SharedArrayBuffer only to a cross-origin isolated document, which needs two headers on every response:
Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy: same-origin
Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy: require-corpWithout them the capability check refuses to start, for every visitor, on every browser. Not a degraded mode — a refusal, correctly, because a renderer that cannot get its threads is a renderer that would produce the wrong picture slowly.
So the split is deliberate and permanent: Cloudflare Pages hosts the application, because it sets arbitrary headers from a _headers file on the free tier; GitHub Pages hosts these documents, which need no headers at all. Netlify and Vercel also qualify for the app. Neither host is a fallback for the other, and pointing this site at the built app would ship something that starts for nobody.
CI asserts both headers are present in the build output on every run, because _headers is a plain text file with no schema and a typo in it fails silently in production.
What is on this site
| Page | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Architecture | How the thing is put together, what is pinned, and which risks are known |
| API | The contracts between the layers — WASM core, registry, document, GPU, worker |
| Development | Running it, building it, testing it, and every command that does so |
| Requirements | Every requirement id in these documents, and the sections that discuss it |
What is not on this site, on purpose
The effect catalogue and the user guide are in the app. Both are generated from the sealed effect registry at run time: the guide states no count of its own, and the catalogue is enumerated from the descriptors rather than listed. A snapshot of either published here would be correct on the day it shipped and wrong, with no error anywhere, on the day an effect was added. Open the app and press ?.
Screenshots are in the repository's README, beside the outputs that produced them.
Getting the source
git clone https://github.com/orkcom-tech/dither-ork
cd dither-ork
docker compose upThe Development page is the rest of that story: what the two compose services do, why the toolchain versions live in a Dockerfile, and how to run each of the four test suites.