by John Presley
2025-3-2
I spent some time writing a variety of more modern looking websites at first. There were animations and information density was low. In the end, I didn't care for them enough to keep trying to develop them and I already am a neophyte in website design so I couldn't get far without at least some passion. In the end, writing this directly into a raw HTML file is somehow more interesting to me. It might appear both gauche and unbearably primitive but there is something to be said for maintaining a relationship to a more protean state of affairs. Nescire autem quid ante quam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum.
In a time before even jQuery, between the sinking of Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas, it was an age undreamed of. What is the difference between a world of enthusiasts serving their recipes and journals and essays directly across the earth using FTP and HTML versus maintaining a Wordpress blog or Substack? There are some. One would be that they are different forms of life and these forms each make possible different kinds of thinking. Different modes of thought obtaining is owed to differing relationships to the subtrate of their work.
The people who carved their thoughts into the byte-stone were freeholders. Like Orlando Bloom in Kingdom of Heaven, they tilled their own land and dug their own wells. For those who insist on the unequivocal value of pushing specialization to its limits, we can at least offer the consolation that most were not personally implementing HTML 1.0 in C on servers that lived on their bedroom floor. Though some were. While this isn't how web pages are built today, I think that engaging with the most fundamental tools for doing something is instructive in a way nothing else is.
An earlier version of this site was actually a SPA implemented entirely in vanilla Javascript. I set up something like a state machine to manage the DOM and then dynamically rendered HTML content based on the state. Navigating the site was done entirely using keyboard shortcuts which were displayed on each page. I used the familiar blue and yellow DOS color scheme for most of the pages and some fun CSS gradient tricks for very sick borders. It was completely insane. But I learned more about how the DOM works and what Javascript is and does in a few hours of doing that than I did in weeks long React and Node projects. I learned things which I may have never learned about any other way.
And it was also fun. When you're not chained to a series of frameworks and libraries that are "necessary" and you simply have HTML, CSS, JS, and your personal goals and ideas, you feel like you're setting out on the open sea in a sailing vessel. It may not be a steamship or tanker but its yours and you can learn it inside and out and make it do exactly what you want it to do, with nothing dragging you down which is irrelevant to your mission. While I decided that I didn't really want to use that as my personal site, making it taught me a lot and maybe I'll revive it in some form in the future.
This site is, by comparison, exceedingly simple. But it is how I'd like for my personal website to look and function. I am happy to get some taste of an older time and how people then interacted with their computers and how they may have thought about things when they were building their Anime Web Turnpikes and RPGamers.