4.3 KiB
New Blog
Peaceful and Respectful Website
There is a trend about website being quite less accessible, using more and more resources, adding trackers, popups, videos, animations, big js frameworks, etc…
I wanted a more peaceful and respectful website.
That website was created with the following constraints in mind by order of priority:
- Respect Privacy; no tracker of any sort (no ads, no google analytics, no referrer for all external links, etc…)
- javascript free; no js at all, yes even the theme changer
- Accessible; should be easy to read on a text browser so people with disabilities could easily consume it
- nerdy; should feel mostly like markdown text in a terminal and source code should be syntax highlighted.
- theme switchable; support your preferred light/dark theme by default but you can change it if you want.
- rss; you should be able to get informed when I add a new blog post.
- frugal; try to minimize the resources needed to visit my website; no javascript, no web-font, not too much CSS magic, not much images or really compressed one.
Some of the constraints are straightforward to get, some other not.
Respect Privacy
The one should be easy, simply not put any 3rd party inclusion in my website. So, no external CSS in my headers, no link to any image I do not host myself. No 3rd party javascript.
Javascript Free
I do not really see why a content oriented website should need to execute javascript.
Accessible
A good way to check that a website is friendly to disabled people is by looking at it with a text browser. If you open most website today you see that at the top of the page is crippled with a numerous number of links/metas info used for javascript tricks, login/logout buttons, etc… The website should only contain, a pretty minimal menu to navigate, and the content.
Nerdy
The feel of the website should be nerdy, it should look like reading a terminal or emacs. It should almost feel the same as if you were using a text-browser. For sensible people, I added a "modern" theme that should better suit modern eye, still the first design should always be the terminal looking one.
Theme switchable
Even if you are not used to disability friendly browser. The website should try to guess your preferred way to consume my website. Recently we dark/light themes were integrated as a new CSS feature. This website should propose your apparently preferred theme. But you could also change it manually.
RSS
This is another layer that help you consume my website as you prefer. You should at least be informed a new article has been published.
Frugal
This one is a bit tricky. It would mean, that visiting my website should not consume much resources. Mainly, this would prevent using heavy medias as much as possible. So, no video, no animated gif, no image if possible or very sparse one.
How
CSS
My CSS should be nerdy, so all title font-size should be equal to the body font size. Also, I wanted to simulate markdown notation, so my HTML will look like a text file. There are a few tricks about that.
One of think that wasn't straightforward while writing the CSS was about providing a user controlled theme. So click and change theme and without any javascript involved. That theme changer is really the limit up to which I agree to concede to modern standards because it is CSS only.
The trick is to provide one checkbox per theme at the beginning of the body
of the HTML.
Then hide those checkbox and have label for each check box.
Then use the sibling CSS selector ~.
Then put all your content in a div of class .main for example.
Finally in the CSS you can write things like:
input#themeid:checked ~ .main { // style when foo is checked }