🛠️ Using Simple Tools as a Radical Act of Independence
Jarrett Fuller:
Content management systems, such as Wordpress or Squarespace, have made designing and publishing on the internet easier than ever—but they’ve also obscured the simplicity of HTML and CSS pages. As the capabilities of internet browsers have increased, so too have the tools increased in complexity. It would be much harder for a 15-year-old today to View Source and understand the code structure that built the website they’re on. Every site is layered with analytics, code snippets, javascript plugins, CMS data, and more.
I was that 15-year-old.
When I built this site I made sure viewing the source shows you something comprehensible, something you can learn from. The source of this site is written for both web browsers and humans. So, not every site, but I get where Jarrett is coming from.
One last quote, because it's important:
This is why the simplicity of HTML and CSS now feels like a radical act. To build a website with just these tools is a small protest against platform capitalism: a way to assert sustainability, independence, longevity.
Exactly.