Why plain HTML? ⤴

Today I converted this website into a bunch of manually authored HTML pages, and this is a short reflection on why did I do so.

You might know I like minimalism and assume this was an ideological act. Quite contrary, it's utterly pragmatic. I looked at my website as a system to engineer, in the context, and optimised it for building, use and maintenance.

Let's start with the ease of use. Using the system in this context mostly means creating new blog entries. Doing it in plain HTML is ridiculously easy in Emacs with emmet and yasnippet. With such setup I don't suffer even a bit in comparison to writing in Markdown or anything else “lightweight”.

Maintaining and extending the system is pretty straightforward too. The time sunk into learning, configuring and updating frameworks I used in the past is easily more than any “manual” work I envision in the future for this humble website. I can automate a wide variety of sweeping changes with either simple search & replace or writing an ad hoc AST transformation.

2021-01-13