Specialized Content Rules: Kanji and Programming Lessons

Chapter 4 covered rules for lessons in a spoken language. This chapter covers two more content families that each needed their own dedicated rule set, for two genuinely different reasons: kanji pages are interactive and dual-purpose in a way no other content type on the site is, and programming lessons needed L2's own convention generalized beyond Python to any language without losing Python's already-established, carefully-tuned format.

K1 — The Stroke Animation Method

Every kanji page includes a stroke-order animation. K1's own rule is narrow but firm: build it with a self-hosted stroke-data library, never a CDN-script approach that makes the page's own functionality depend on some third party's server staying online forever. A kanji page should work exactly the same whether that external service is reachable or not — because it never talks to one in the first place.

K2 — Dual-Write: One Page, Two Locations

Every kanji page gets written to two places at once, kept identical: an archive copy that's deliberately excluded from the live site's own routing (a pure reference folder), and the live copy actually served to visitors. Skipping either half isn't a shortcut — it either breaks the live site or silently stops maintaining the permanent archive, so K2 treats the second write as a cheap, non-optional step rather than an afterthought.

K3 — Keeping the Tiles Page in Sync

A newly generated kanji page is useless if nothing links to it. K3 requires the kanji tiles grid's own kanjiList array to be updated in the very same step a kanji page is written or rewritten — character, meaning, and href, all added together, never as a separate follow-up task.

K4 — The World of Kanji Book Cross-Reference

The user owns a printed kanji reference book indexed by number rather than page. K4 lets a generated page link back to that number as one more tag alongside the page's existing JLPT-level and stroke-count badges — but only when a real number is actually supplied. A request with no reference number at all should be met with a direct question rather than a guess, and an explicit 0 is treated as "no reference," not as a literal reference number 0 — the tag is simply omitted in that case, never left as an empty placeholder.

Programming Lessons: P8 and PL1–PL3

A separate, unrelated content family: standalone, one-off lessons on a single programming topic — closer in spirit to Chapter 4's own language lessons than to a numbered course, since there's no fixed chapter count and no Fundamentals/Intermediate/Advanced track.

By default, a PL1 request produces two files — the lesson and its exercise companion — unless a modifier says otherwise. That default matters because it's the one place in this chapter where a single prompt silently expands into two pieces of generated content rather than one.

Coding Challenges