Night Dispatch Register

State 01 Loading skeleton — 21:38, polls arriving

Skeleton holds the final geometry

Placeholder bars inherit per-column widths from real content — a mono-width time bar, a long station bar, short right-aligned numerals — not uniform grey stripes. The register is marked busy; nothing shifts when data lands.

Correct when: bar widths vary by column, zero layout shift on data arrival, aria-busy set, motion honours reduced-motion.

State 02 Empty — 21:30, commissioning night

No events yet, and the register says why

Empty is not an error and not "No data." It states what is empty, why, and the next thing that will change it.

Correct when: the message names the cause, the expected fill time, and offers a next action — never a bare "No data."

State 03 Error — 01:52, link down 3 h 30 m

The failure is named; the last good data is kept, marked stale

Error is not empty: data exists but is stale. The banner names the failing component and the outage duration; the rows below are the last good poll, dimmed and tagged, never silently passed off as live.

Correct when: banner distinguishes error from empty and from partial, stale rows are visibly devalued, and a retry path exists.

State 04 Partial — 02:50, storm degradation

Nine of fourteen reporting — the silent five are named

Partial is not error: most stations are live. The register prints the reported fraction and names every silent station, and shows their last known state without inventing values.

Correct when: silent stations appear as rows with honest em-dashes, never zeros or cached numbers passed as live.

State 05 Filtered-empty — 02:50, two filters active

Empty because of these filters — not because the night was quiet

A different emptiness from State 02: the register holds 35 events, and this combination excludes all of them. The message explains the collision and offers to undo it — it never reuses the commissioning message.

Correct when: message differs from State 02, active filters are visible and removable in one action, and the path back to data is one click.

State 06 Sorted — 02:50, by level, highest first

One sort key, one indicator, ties broken by time

Exactly one column carries the indicator; the sort is stable and its tiebreak is stated, not implied — Salt Fleet's 76.2 cm leads, and the two 60.5 cm rows resolve by time, Cow Short before Lamb-marsh.

Correct when: a single ▼, the column values are genuinely non-increasing, and the 60.5 cm tie resolves by time ascending as the caption promises.

State 07 Selected — 02:50, three of eight

Selection is countable and reversible

The selection column appears only in select mode. Three rows are checked; the header checkbox is indeterminate (−), not checked; the action bar states the count and offers the bulk verb — acknowledge — plus a way out.

Correct when: count matches checked rows, indeterminate header state is honest, every bulk action is reachable by keyboard, Clear always visible.

State 08 Overflow — page 1 of 63

Twenty of 1,248 — and the wide table scrolls with its anchor pinned

Both overflows at once, each with its instrument: the count line and pager own the vertical; the pinned Time column owns the horizontal — rows keep their anchor no matter how far right the register scrolls.

Wide register scrolls sideways — Time stays pinned→

Correct when: count line agrees with pager totals, current page is non-interactive, and the first column stays visually pinned while scrolling horizontally.