bendun.cc

Website update!

I was stuck in a loop. I wanted new version to be perfect, multilingual, with all of the gizmos and frippery backend (obviously in Rust). At each iteration behind the scenes I quickly lost interest beacuse I didn't want to write a website engine, I wanted to write the content but started at automation to my demise. And it's not like I hate writing HTML or CSS, I don't like repeatition so didn't want to copy and paste headers from one place to another.

Coming out: I like HTML and CSS

Internet loves to make fun of web devs and the technologies that they are using. Despite beeing more of a system-level programming person I never felt like it was justified. And I like this part of the web, I think that JavaScript is making it worse and HTML and CSS are the good parts. I understand that they may be hard to work with if you want to create pixel-perfect designs, but at this point you are trying to use the technology incorrectly. They are structured documents primarly, and layout systems secondarily (if even). I wait until web dev redisovers writing custom layout engines using canvas and WebGL.

Manual until it hurts

Just write some HTML! Is that simple. No need for fancy static site generators or CMS. Read more about "manual until it hurts" and The HTML Hobbyist.

Accessibility

My biggest pain point with just writing HTML was accessibility for potential non-English readers. Especially one my friend that is isolated from my writing when it isn't in Polish. I always have this thought that with custom HTTP Server I could somehow created the perfect experience for both languages. Seeing that none of my previous attemps were ever put to the internet, I failed at that. For now I will mostly write in English since that is the language that I primary use for computer science and media analysis. I hope that some of the writing would also be in Polish.

Non-linguistic accessibility

Obviously, this side should be as accesible as just a text file (or more since we have structure). The main guideline is obviously completion with web standards. Additionally I want to restrict myself to using only non-structural JavaScript (= no JavaScript generated content), excluding things like animations. Disabling JavaScript is a right that I value highly and those readers should have the full content for them.

I'm also interested in accessibility for computers, especially structured data interleaved with normal text using schema.org. My dream is that my site can become easy source of data without exporting API points or CSV files.

Current convention

I want to try making this website with some sort of narrative that joins all the parts into semi-coherent structure. It doesn't needs to be perfect. I don't want to make just another blog side, I want experience. Of course it is not ready yet. It never will be ready. But I want to tinker on it from time to time, just to have fun in this few moments of spare time.