Mynd (Old Norse: a picture, an image, a likeness; and the shape a thing has, from munda, to aim at, to have in view). A living, animating drawing held still at one instant and handed over as a picture that stands on its own. A board is moving and somebody wants a picture of it, right now, exactly as it looks — not a re-render, not an approximation from the model, the actual thing. The browser already knows the answer: a paused animation's transform is a matrix in computed style and its opacity is a number there, so the hard part is done, by the engine, for free, and all that is needed is to read it and write it down. The world group is cloned, the live tree and the clone are walked side by side, each element's COMPUTED look and place are written inline on the clone, the class names the stylesheet gave meaning to are dropped, the reader's own pan and zoom are taken off, the definitions the marks point at travel inside the same text, and the result is serialized. THE ORIGINAL IS READ AND NEVER WRITTEN. Then pure string work: the frozen markup wrapped as a standalone document at one unit to one pixel, byte-stable so the same instant gives the same characters forever; a data URL; and a paint onto a canvas that hands back the picture's bytes. Every door to the drawing machine is INJECTED through a surface of two verbs, so the whole road runs where no browser stands and the proofs walk it there with a browser written by hand. The picture is DERIVED AND NEVER STORED — not the millisecond, not the size, not the pixels — and an empty board has no picture at all and says so, rather than answering with a blank rectangle. The pixel box rounds outward so no mark ever loses an edge to a rounding.
Old Norse mynd (a picture, an image, a likeness; the shape a thing has), from munda (to aim at, to have in view); a drawing held still at one instant and handed over as a picture that stands on its own.
A board caught at one instant and handed over as its own picture — not a re-render, the actual thing, derived and never stored.