2022-08-15

I spent some time bringing my SDF homepage back to life. I remember that
SDF used to publish a directory of member homepages but I think that
was removed awhile ago. In any case, I left my homepage pretty blank
for a long time but I dusted off some webpages I made from the early
2000s and cleaned them up a little.

I have a link in my gophermap but anyone reading this phlog can just
go to http://canfood.decsystem.org/ and take a look.

I find it pretty interesting that there is kind of a movement to go
back and create simpler webpages without the modern javascript/CSS heavy
cruft.

Nearly all of my webpages are handwritten HTML with no javascript or CSS.
But it's not particularly because I'm trying to follow that minimal
back to the web roots movement, but in fact because I never bothered
to learn CSS or Javascript.

the one exception to that in my homepage is the web gallery for old
school software. That gallery was generated from Adobe Photoshop 7.0
and is monstrously non-standard and non-compliant HTML. But tbh that's
a pretty authentic web surfing experience from the late 90s so I didn't
bother fixing any of that.

I learned HTML 2.0 and 3.2 all the way back in the day and I never bothered
to learn anything else. In fact, once you learn HTML 3.2, you pretty
much have everything you need to publish content for anyone in the world
to read. You don't really need anymore than that. 

As for aesthetics? well I'm an engineer and I really don't care for it
all that much. I like my content with a lot of information density and
don't really need a lot of graphical niceties.

However, there's probably one modern web trick that I do think is worth
it and that's the 'dark mode' options that some webpages have. 

That's something that is a little harder to accomplish on static websites
and kind of requires the user to do it old school and modify browsers.

It's hard to believe, but back in the 90s, people routinely modified browser
settings to fit their own color schemes and aesthetic preferences. This
was because there really wasn't any styling so users were kinda encouraged
to edit their own "style sheets" through browser properties. 

The descendants of this tradition would be user editable stylesheets and
extensions like Stylish in the web 2.0 era. I'm not sure how popular that
is nowadays but I do remember downloading user created stylesheets that
made Google Reader much more information dense.

but another easy way to get dark mode is to just surf on the command line
with lynx :-D