Elinks keybindings12/20/2023 ![]() On an increasingly-bloated Internet, a website which is anywhere remotely as fast as it could be is a breath of fresh air. Pages can even be read without much problem in a smartphone or a text browser like elinks. JavaScript is not required for the core reading experience, only for optional features: comments, table-sorting, sidenotes, and so on. Semantic markup is used where Markdown permits. This does not mean lacking features many ‘minimalist’ designs proud of their simplicity are merely simple-minded. Various classic typographical tools, like drop caps and small caps are used for theming or emphasis. The palette is deliberately kept to grayscale as an experiment in consistency and whether this constraint permits a readable aesthetically-pleasing website. Anything besides the content is distraction and not design. I believe that minimalism helps one focus on the content. The design esthetic is minimalist, with a dash of Art Nouveau. ![]() I feel I’ve reached the point where it’s worth sweating the small stuff, typographically. Design improvements, on the other hand, benefit one’s entire website & all future readers, and so at a certain scale, can be quite useful. Writing is hard work, and any new piece of writing will generally add to the pile of existing ones, rather than multiplying it all it’s an enormous amount of work to go through all one’s existing writings and improve them somehow, so it usually doesn’t happen. ![]() 1 It’s hardly worth it for writing just a few things.īut the joy of web design & typography is that just its presentation can matter a little to all your pages. If we added up all the small touches, they surely make a difference to the reader’s happiness, but it would have to be a small one-say, 5%. ![]() Perhaps 1% of readers could even name any of these details, much less recognize them. And the most tastefully-designed page, with true smallcaps and correct use of em-dashes vs en-dashes vs hyphens vs minuses and all, which loads in a fraction of a second and is SEO optimized, is of little avail if the page has nothing worth reading no amount of typography can rescue a page of dreck. A page can be terribly designed and render as typewriter text in 80-column ASCII monospace, and readers will still read it, even if they complain about it. The sorrow of web design & typography is that it all can matter just a little how you present your pages. “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” What does it take to present, for the long-term, complex, highly-referenced, link-intensive, long-form text online as effectively as possible, while conserving the reader’s time & attention? Benefit (For a demo of all features & stress-test page, see Lorem Ipsum.)Īlso discussed are the many failed experiments / changes made along the way. Unusual features include the monochrome esthetics, sidenotes instead of footnotes on wide windows, efficient drop caps/smallcaps, collapsible sections, automatic inflation-adjusted currency, Wikipedia-style link icons & infoboxes, custom syntax highlighting, extensive local archives to fight linkrot, and an ecosystem of “popup”/“popin” annotations & previews of links for frictionless browsing-the net effect of hierarchical structures with collapsing and instant popup access to excerpts enables iceberg-like pages where most information is hidden but the reader can easily drill down as deep as they wish. It stands out from your standard Markdown static website by aiming at good typography, fast performance, and advanced hypertext browsing features (at the cost of great implementation complexity) the 4 design principles are: aesthetically-pleasing minimalism, accessibility/progressive-enhancement, speed, and a ‘structural reading’ approach to hypertext use. is implemented as a static website compiled via Hakyll from Pandoc Markdown and hosted on a dedicated server (due to expensive cloud bandwidth).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |