22 · An identity that can be erased

Kolofon has a setting that switches off the engine signature in the footer. It exists for instances published anonymously or under a pen name: a site is under no obligation to announce what it runs on, and information about the supplier is sometimes the first thread somebody pulls.

The setting worked. The generated HTML contained not a single occurrence of the engine's name. The whole time that was true, a JavaScript file served from the same domain held a constant with the engine's name and address — legible, with no obfuscation, findable by anybody who opens the file.

The mechanism of the failure is instructive, because there is no error in the code anywhere in it. The setting is read at runtime, from the instance configuration. The build tool has no way of establishing that the branch reading “if the signature is enabled” will never execute, so it leaves it in the output together with the text that branch renders. The code was dead. The text was alive.

This is a broader principle than one case. Anything that is not to exist in the result must be settled before the result is produced. A condition checked at render time decides whether you see something — not whether something is there. Hiding presence requires an earlier moment.

The fix moves the decision to build time. The instance supplies the value as a compile-time constant, the branch collapses to a literal, and the text on the dead side vanishes from the output. After the change, a scan of the entire built site — server code, client code, assets — finds not one occurrence. Not because it is hidden. Because it is not there.

It is also worth noticing where this bug was found, because it was not in the code. A code review showed a setting doing exactly what it promises. Only a search through the built output revealed text that should not have been there. Promises about privacy have to be checked against the artefact rather than the source — the source describes an intention, the artefact is what the reader actually receives.

The principle that remains is shorter than its justification: the engine has no business knowing who it was built for, and if it does know, it has no business saying so in a place nobody looks at.