The record line is a table

[dmarx]

My complaint was that the frontmatter fields were rendering on a single line, separated only by a center dot. I think a table would probably look nicer.

Agreed, and it reads far better. LIT-140, before and after:

Before

> **Status** Active · **Filed** 2026-09-05 · **Extends** LIT-141 ·
  **Extended by** LIT-151 · LIT-181 · **Compared against** LIT-152 ·
  **Supersedes** LIT-141 · **Cited as `source` by** SOTA-136

After

| | |
|---|---|
| **Status** | Active |
| **Filed** | 2026-09-05 |
| **Extends** | LIT-141 |
| **Extended by** | LIT-151 · LIT-181 |
| **Compared against** | LIT-152 |
| **Supersedes** | LIT-141 |
| **Cited as `source` by** | SOTA-136 |

One line of **Label** value reads acceptably at three facts and not at eleven — it becomes a paragraph of bolded fragments a reader has to parse before they can scan. A table gives every fact the same shape and puts the labels in a column. The center dot keeps its job inside a cell, where it separates peers (two contesting papers, three sources) rather than separating kinds.

Header-less on purpose (| | |) — "Field" and "Value" name nothing a reader did not already know from the rows.

On note-properties — it can't do this job

Maybe this is a quartz setting? Probably this: quartz.config.default.yaml#L225-L241

Two reasons that's not the lever, and the second is the interesting one.

It's a v5 plugin; actions/site pins v4.5.2. The action's own input docs already say why the pin is deliberate: "luria site writes a quartz.config.ts against this version's plugin API, and v5 replaced that file with a YAML one." ~110 lines of generated TypeScript config and layout would need rewriting as YAML.

A properties panel shows the page's own frontmatter — and that's the smaller half of this line. The plugin's README describes it as "a visible properties view on the page, similar to Obsidian's properties panel." What's actually on LIT-140's record line:

bit	where it comes from
Status	this page's frontmatter, but composed — Superseded — by X; note is three fields read as one reading
Extends, Compared against	this page's frontmatter, as resolved links rather than bare codes
Supersedes	another document's superseded_by:
Cited as \source` by`	a backlink — every page naming this one

A panel over this page's YAML renders the first row as Superseded and the second as the literal string LIT-141, and cannot render the last two at all — it has no reader for other documents. Enabling it would put a raw-YAML block beside the record line, not replace it.

So they aren't alternatives. Upgrading Quartz is worth doing on its own merits — five versions of upstream work, the v5 plugin ecosystem — and I'm happy to take it as its own piece; it just doesn't bear on this complaint, and record_line needed to be a table either way.

The change

record_line and its two helpers built formatted strings (f"**{label}** {value}") and joined them; they now build (label, value) pairs and one _table renders them. That's the whole diff — the mechanical cost of having had formatting and content in the same expression.

Twelve assertions moved from "**Label** value" to "| **Label** | value |", and three stopped assuming the blockquote it no longer is. That count is a fair measure of how load-bearing the shape was, and worth knowing before anyone changes it again.

record_line is called in exactly one place, inside stage, so this only shapes the staged Quartz vault — the record files in the repository are untouched, and nothing about how they read on GitHub changes.

Checks

python -m pytest tests -q → 924 passed. luria link --fix, luria index, luria lint → clean. Rendered against the anthology's real corpus (346 record lines staged).

Stacked on #195, whose commit is included here until that merges — this branch is ac6d672 plus one commit.

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