💾 Archived View for altesq.net › ~evenfire › posts › simplicity-and-html.gmi captured on 2023-09-08 at 16:12:22. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
After experimenting around with Hugo a while, I gave it a try for WWW web pages. Learned to make a theme, configure it properly and all. Although when I checked Gemini, I got reminded of its simplicity, and it struck me how complex all of the WWW is in order to display some text.
In the end, I spent more time tweaking CSS and various layouts than actually publishing content on that website I made. With HTML, there's always something that can go wrong, especially on mobile layouts. To achieve a usable state, you probably need to pour in a few hours of work with an SSG, then there's still a plethora of tweaks you can do. The irony being, you get to spend more time tweaking than posting content, right, which is not a practical way of writing at all whatsoever. Sure, it is more accessible, but is it worth it? I'm thinking of using a Gemini to HTTP proxy and proxy the website.
After a week of not having what to write, really, my first post is complaining about HTML, which is always a good idea to do whenever you want to write something. Jokes aside, I know HTML, yet I dislike HTML. I can completely understand why formats like Markdown were created, because no one wants to waste all their day editing raw HTML, maybe aside from a few guys.
What I'm getting at, is why, emphasis on why, do we need all this complexity to show some text? I'm speaking about static websites here, but it's even worse on dynamic ones. Using Python to display HTML and CSS? Yes (looking at you Django). Although it has its uses, retail, banks, etc. dynamic websites are just a whole another mess, but static website generators are no better. The time you spend configuring the first time an SSG you probably can get an HTML website up by hand, although the disadvantages would come later on as you must be mildly masochist to actually write blog posts or wikis in raw HTML.
Oh, I didn't even get to actually deploying it. Want to convert it to Markdown? Sure, there's Pandoc. Want to convert it to Gemtext from Markdown? Okay, few tools exists but iffy. Want to convert it directly? Good luck. You probably end up with some self glued shell script that converts and deploys, or a Make file. But really? A Make file for a blog? It's an absurd idea in itself, but with technologies like HTML, it has brought us to this point. Flawed from the beginning.