This colophon1 addresses all that goes into the design principles that drive the technical implementation of this blog.
In a few words, it isn't built like one of these moderns Web blobs throwing heaps of heterogeneous modern solutions at modern problems.
Not much of anything
I suggest here that these modern problems are merely perceptual or cultural: there is no problem and I therefore provide, refreshingly, no solution.
No dependencies.
This Web site is compiled using a single binary executable: it has zero dependencies.
None on CSS preprocessors, none on JavaScript frameworks, none on templating
system, none on image processing pipelines...
There are no vaguely arcane vulnerabilities possible, no breaking changes upstream, no obsolescence of any kind in any development tool: no maintenance, at all, by design, for perpetuity.
No JavaScript either.
Despite being quite the enthusiast, here I mean again to take a stance: no JavaScript. None for the interactive elements (drop-down menu, links and back-references, annotation tooltips, collapsible table of contents...), none for the responsiveness, none for the templating or styling.
And no pictures.
What do you know, text also works quite well to convey information, although
I did indulge in some few SVG
icons rendered in their native dimension of 16×16 pixels.
Uncompromising simplicity
This entire Web site employs a single CSS document, and
each article is a single HTML page. The rest are a few
fonts, optimised for Web performance using the Web Open Font
Format.
On the topic of the CSS, you won't find in there any rounded corner, any
shadows, any opacity, any background or text gradient, nor any click or hover
animation. I trade generic, hyper-modern, canned design for some bold,
stand-alone, simple elegance.
A full "production" build, creating all files from scratch, syntactically
highlighting code blocks, preparing all RSS/Atom feeds, et cet. takes about
125ms.
Once I address the outstanding caching challenge, that entry shall also tout uncompromising performance.
B-but, the user experience?
The UX is still very much front and centre.
This Web site is optimised for all devices from mobiles to desktop, for landscape and portrait displays alike, for both dark and light modes, all responsively adjusting to your physical set-up and personal preferences.
It also looks surprisingly fancy in offering semantically grounded transitions on Web browsers that support them while also degrading gracefully on those that do not, and being respectful of your possible preferences for reduced motion in either case.
I'd go so far as to argue that this package is certain to be quite more
polite and comprehensive than the average SPA you'd find in the wild.
Some room for improvement
There remains the question of adequate accessibility that I haven't quite addressed yet: this Web site isn't most navigable through screen readers, and some elements in the info-bar for articles and series may be lacking in contrast—though that is a semantic and stylistic choice.
Additionally, the caching strategy is suboptimal: this site is currently hosted on GitHub Pages, which doesn't support custom caching rules, but I intend to remedy that situation one of these days.