this is a website
the stack
I may have chosen the most controversial tech-stack for this website: HTML+CSS.
Yep, that's it. There are currently no static site generators, no templating engines, no nothing. Just plain, hand-written HTML and CSS. Why am I doing it this way?
First of, I want to keep this website stupid simple. By writing all of the HTML and CSS by hand, I see all the things going on while working on the site. By using a templating engine or static site generator I'd only see the small parts, not the big picture.
Secondly, I plan on writing my own tooling for this website eventually. By working at the lowest level of the web, I now know how the output of my own tools should look like. I also know what features I definitely want in my tooling, so I don't implement stuff I would never need. Usage driven development.
And, to be honest, I kinda enjoyed just writing some HTML, refreshing Firefox, tweaking the CSS a little bit, refreshing Firefox again, and so on. Very relaxing work.
the html part
I limited myself to only use semantic HTML elements. No divs, no spans. There is nothing more dissapointing in
the web world to me than finding a really nice website, taking a look at how they did things, only to find out
that it's just divs in divs in divs, with class names like main, section and so on.
Like, did nobody tell them that there are HTML elements exactly named like that?
the css part
If you take a look at the CSS stylesheet of this website, you may notice that there's not much going on. I try to work with the browsers defaults as much as possible, while still giving this site a personal touch.
why minimal
We live in a world where we use a lot of resources, most of the time just to get a little bit closer to the 100 % perfect product. But, considering the pareto principle, you just need 20 % of the resources to get 80 % of the results. I don't need to control every little tiny detail of this website to deliver a good experience.
The cost of being minimal is simply losing control. I don't know what font is displayed, I don't know what font size, I don't know what color scheme is used. What are the benefits? This website is small, fast and (hopefully) accessible.
the future of this site
I do plan on writing more stuff on here. Ideally, I'd like to continue this for a long time. This also means, that writing every HTML file from hand will be pain eventually (it already kinda is). So, to fix that, I want to write a simple program that stitches together some small files, basically some kind of templating program.
Another, more challenging project would be my own little markup language which ideally integrates into the templating program. I could just use Markdown and an off-the-shelf static site generator, but where'd be the fun in that :P