The tiles that come back empty

Two of the tiles above ran a real measurement over the three published addresses and found nothing. They draw a small outlined icon and a sentence saying what came back empty.

The third tile is the same family of measurement finding something, and it is included for contrast. Between them they show what the board does in both cases, on one strip, without a caption explaining that this is a demonstration.

• Hide the tile. The reader never learns the measurement was attempted, and every remaining tile becomes a selected one.
• Show a zero styled like any other value. The reader cannot tell an empty result from a measured zero, and those are different things.
• Show an empty state that says what came back empty. The reader learns both the result and the fact that it was tried.

Hiding is not a lie about any individual number. It is worse than that. Once a board hides its empty results, the reader is looking at a selected sample of measurements, and there is no way from the outside to tell how large the selection was.

That is the mechanism by which honest looking dashboards mislead. Every figure on the screen is accurate, every one of them was computed properly, and the picture as a whole is false because of what is not there. It requires no dishonesty at any step, which is why it is so common.

The two empty tiles are not a technical curiosity. They say that no two character sequence occurs twice inside any of the three addresses, and that no longer chunk repeats either.

That is a real property of the strings and a genuinely useful one. Ordinary text repeats constantly, which is why people can partially remember it and partially reconstruct it. These strings do neither, and the empty tiles are the evidence. The repetition panel works through what follows from that.

On the panel about where addresses come from, and on the panel about what this board leaves out, a tile labelled as checks performed on the addresses draws empty. That one is not a measurement failing, it is an absence being made visible where a reader is looking for a number.

A section with no panels would also draw an empty state rather than rendering nothing, and so would a tile strip on a page that declared none. None of those occur at the moment, and they are implemented anyway, because a board that breaks when a section is empty is a board that cannot be changed safely.

A dashboard is a persuasive shape. It implies that everything worth knowing is on the screen, that the screen is complete, and that the numbers were chosen because they matter rather than because they were available.

None of those implications is usually true, and none of them is true here either. The empty tiles are the smallest available way of saying so continuously, in the place where the reader is actually looking, rather than in a paragraph at the bottom that everybody skips.

Is an empty tile the same as a zero?

No. A measured zero is a result. An empty tile means the measurement returned nothing at all, and the board keeps them visually distinct.

Why implement empty states for cases that never happen?

Because a board that only works when it has data is a board nobody can safely change. The empty cases are cheap and they keep the rest honest.