Evidence class: what a value actually rests on
An evidence class says what a value rests on. Four are used here: a sentence a vendor wrote, a line carried by a layout, a default with no plan attached, and a plan that does not exist. As of 2026-09-22.
| The term | Evidence class |
|---|---|
| What it names | The kind of thing a recorded value was read from |
| What it is not | A judgement about whether a vendor is being candid |
| Where the register uses it | Beside every reading, and in the rail of each one |
Inclusion rule. Words this site uses in a narrow sense, where the ordinary sense would lead a reader to misread a cell. No vendor statement appears on this page. Order. Fixed order: what the word names, what it excludes, then where it is used here.
1Four classes, and how each one ages
A sentence survives a redesign: the clause is either still printed or visibly gone. A value carried by a layout has to be reconstructed whenever the layout moves. A documented default belongs to a vendor that attaches no plan to its mark. And where no plan is published, the question has no subject to be silent about.
Those four differ in how much of a row depends on a page still looking the way it looked, which is exactly what a reader needs in order to discount a value appropriately. The class is printed rather than implied.
2Why it is not a grade
A vendor that publishes a clear grid and no sentence is writing a sales document, which is what sales documents are for. The class describes this register's exposure, not the company's behaviour, and the two are easy to confuse because the sturdier evidence often happens to be the less flattering statement.
That pattern is itself worth noticing: written statements here tend to describe restrictive behaviour, because a permissive free tier gets advertised rather than disclosed. It is a fact about writing practice and not about candour.
3What it changes for maintenance
Re-confirming a sentence is opening a page and looking for a clause. Redoing a layout reading means establishing which columns exist, what is inherited and whether a glyph carries the meaning. Both are work; only one of them can be done quickly and reliably at scale.
So the class predicts which rows will go stale first and which will still be quotable in a year. A finding page that counts values by class is counting durability rather than counting vendors.
Nothing on this page is a vendor statement; the values it helps read are on the support table, with the page and the date each one was read from. See also the protocol page, what earns a row. Nearby terms: reading date, value since, stable identifier.