04 Feb 2024
I kinda want to revamp - or should I say, devamp - my website. I'm happy with where it's at right now but even having very minimal CSS it still looks a little too modern for my liking. I've never been good at web design, not the pretty stuff anyway. Any time I try to do some neat stuff with CSS I end up holding a ruler to my screen. Last I checked that's not how you're supposed to do things. Not that I've read any proper resources on the topic, I'm just feeling things out as I go. That's really how I've been about technology the whole way now that I think about it. In recent years my web design philosophy has been reduced to pretty much just being "idk, let the user's browser work it out". In recenter years though I've taken a liking to the style of the "old web".
I both like and dislike that it's called the old web, hence the quotes. I like it because it's accurate and easily understandable and kind of a vibe... Okay a lot of a vibe. I have a fax machine in my bedroom and I'm working on getting my computer's floppy drive hooked up. I am now realizing as I write this that I have become a retro tech enthusiast. Oh no? Whoops? I love writing about realizations as I'm having them in real time lol. Anyway, old web good. I think what I like most about it is that the style is very much driven by what the technology at the time could do. You didn't see huge images on sites because the connections just weren't fast enough but now, in 2024, the logo you see in the corner of a site could very easily be bigger than an entire page was on the old web. I feel like this is an... I don't want to say irresponsible, but maybe something like... thoughtless? It feels to me like a thoughtless use of the technology we have now. Just because you can send a 2 MB image doesn't mean you should send a 2 MB image.
I guess me removing most of my CSS is more of a tribute to the old web than anything. It serves no practical purpose, no functional purpose. It's purely aesthetic. And it's an aesthetic I'm proud to embrace.
Long live the old web.