2.6 KiB
Why this website is so simple?
- There's a purpose
- Free as in Freedom
- Use less resources -> save the environment
- KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid
- Exceptions
There's a purpose
My personal website is made only with some html, simple css and a little bit of media (pictures, videos, etc) for several philosophical reasons.
Free as in Freedom
I would like my website to respect every users's freedom by letting this website be viewed without running any non trivial and non free Javascript. Therefore users can view and use my website without running any non free software.
This website is also Free Software and you can get the sources here.
Use less resources -> save the environment
If you build a website with "modern, shiny new web frameworks" like React, Angular or whatever is popular today, either the server or the clients (or both of them) need to spend more resources (cpu cycles, energy, time) in order for users to view and use a website. Maybe for some websites it makes sense, but it definitely doesn't for a personal website like this, as if you get here, you either want to know more about me or my projects or you are willing to read some of my blog posts. In either way you just want to read some text and maybe view some images, so why using a lot of computer power for this? Resources on our planet are limited, so why waste them, if you can achieve your goal without using too much of them?
You can argue, that the energy/resource impact is little. Maybe it is for just one website. But there're millions (maybe even trillions) of websites on the Internet, and when each of them forces users to spend more resources then needed, then at the end it is a lot of wasted resources for the sake of having useless shiny things.
KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid
It is a fairly popular programming pattern, that developers apply to their code. But why using it only for the code, when you can use it for the whole project? Why writing some simple JavaScript if you can do the job without needing any runtime scripting at all?
I thought that way, when I was making this website. I write some text on .org files and use emacs to automatically export those as a static website. It's not only simple, but also gives every user a transparent view of everything, that my website does:
What you see - is what you get.
Exceptions
I have a copy of one website from the Internet Archive as part of my website, and that copied website has a lot of JavaScript inside. It was copied for archiving and I would like to replace it later with just a PDF.