All you may need is HTML
fabiensanglard.net
All you may need is HTML
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Re: All you may need is HTML
#2HTML + CSS for whitespacing & viewport width + SSI | Caddy's template
That combo is more than enough for almost all the websites out there, I've 3 different sites like that and they are blazingly fast, everything served from a $4 VPS (serving about 20k views per week).
Re: All you may need is HTML
#3You may not even need HTML. HTML is subject to different renderings on different browsers, confusing features that may not be supported on different browses, and may tempt you to use JavaScript (which can throw "errors" if written incorrectly).
If you stick to text files, you'll never have to go to caniuse.com ever. Need styles? Just make a PDF and throw that online. During the "XML HTML" phase the web went through, I never had to worry about validating my PDFs through an XML validator. Then when everyone decided using "" and "" tags was bad and insisting we switch to using "font-weight" CSS in a completely unrelated part of the file, guess what I had to do? Nothing! My PDF keeps rendering exactly the same way through every silly "trend" and "update" on the web, and never misses a beat on Lighthouse in Chrome.
Now if I could just convince all the browsers to implement .docx renderers out of the box, I'd really be set.
Re: All you may need is HTML
#4> Originally this website's font-family simply requested monospace. This approach resulted in varying reading experience depending on the OS. Windows browsers got Consolas, Linux users got DejaVu Sans Mono, and macOS people got Courier.
I find it so sad that our browsers have such bad default fonts that all websites feel the need to override them to get an acceptable look. It would be great if browsers had decent defaults for both the overall default as well as serf, sans-serif and monospace so that most websites who aren't worried about font branding can just stick with the default and users can get a good fond, or even their preferred font if they bothered to customize it.
Re: All you may need is HTML
#5You may not even need HTML. HTML is subject to different renderings on different browsers, confusing features that may not be supported on different browses, and may tempt you to use JavaScript (which can throw "errors" if written incorrectly). If you stick to text files, you'll never have to go to caniuse.com ever. Need styles? Just make a PDF and throw that online. During the "XML HTML" phase the web went through,…
Good luck having your site be easy to read on both mobile and desktop with either of these approaches. text/plain may work if you use soft wrapping, but even then most desktop will need to resize their browser window to make it narrow enough to read comfortably.
Re: All you may need is HTML
#6Recently made my first blog/website and used NextJS. It’s been fun adding style and bloat at this stage since everything I do is for learning. But I wonder how many years go by before I opt for something more basic?
He talks about the evolution of his blog in this post[1] and has a link to the web archive of an early version.
Re: All you may need is HTML
#7> Originally this website's font-family simply requested monospace. This approach resulted in varying reading experience depending on the OS. Windows browsers got Consolas, Linux users got DejaVu Sans Mono, and macOS people got Courier. I find it so sad that our browsers have such bad default fonts that all websites feel the need to override them to get an acceptable look. It would be great if browsers had decent def…
In my experience the default fonts on Apple devices are far and away the best fonts, period. They're better than almost every custom font, especially for readability.
Re: All you may need is HTML
#8You may not even need HTML. HTML is subject to different renderings on different browsers, confusing features that may not be supported on different browses, and may tempt you to use JavaScript (which can throw "errors" if written incorrectly). If you stick to text files, you'll never have to go to caniuse.com ever. Need styles? Just make a PDF and throw that online. During the "XML HTML" phase the web went through,…
PDFs are pretty horrible to use on a phone and add much more overhead than CSS and even JS would.
Re: All you may need is HTML
#9You may not even need HTML. HTML is subject to different renderings on different browsers, confusing features that may not be supported on different browses, and may tempt you to use JavaScript (which can throw "errors" if written incorrectly). If you stick to text files, you'll never have to go to caniuse.com ever. Need styles? Just make a PDF and throw that online. During the "XML HTML" phase the web went through,…
Good luck having your site be easy to read on both mobile and desktop with either of these approaches. text/plain may work if you use soft wrapping, but even then most desktop will need to resize their browser window to make it narrow enough to read comfortably.
I love that you went with easiness to read and not "wait, how does anyone navigate on your site without links in plain text files?"
Re: All you may need is HTML
#10It’s nice to see a “You don’t need X” article that isn’t just annoying snark. This actually answers some questions people had, which feels like a much better reason to write something like this, rather than the usual rage-bait “you don’t need JS/CSS/Framework/Technology considered harmful” medium articles.