A deck manifest defines membership

A deck with a non-empty Slides manifest presents exactly the nodes named by that list, in that order. A sibling Slide node that is absent from the manifest can remain as a draft or archive, but it does not appear in the deck counter, Prev/Next navigation, or Present mode.

This is more than a sorting rule. Authors use the manifest to insert, reorder, and remove slides without moving or deleting their source nodes. Appending unlisted siblings makes removed slides silently return to the live talk.

The ordering rules are:

1. A non-empty manifest defines membership and order.
2. An unknown manifest reference is omitted until its node exists.
3. A duplicate reference appears once, at its first position.
4. A slide whose parent is not a deck, or a deck without a manifest, falls back to sibling MeshNode.Order, then path.

The SAV Generalversammlung 2026 deck exposed the defect: its manifest named 18 slides while four retired sibling drafts remained under the deck. The presenter displayed Slide 13 / 22 and could navigate into those drafts. Keeping navigation faithful to the manifest restores the authored 18-slide talk without deleting the drafts.