Subject	https://k1ss.org
From	Dylan Araps <dylan@k1ss.org>
Date	Mon, 18 Feb 2020 14:15:27 +0100


I wrote a little about the new website in my weekly post
yesterday but felt the need to write something in depth
about it.

Each blog post will now be formatted as if it were taken
from a mailing list archive. Why? It's fun and familiar.


HOW ARE PAGES WRITTEN?

The new site doesn't use Markdown or any other kind of
Markup language. Instead each page is written in plain
text with the ability to use HTML tags if needed.

The entire page is wrapped in pre tags with the .txt file
inserted in-between at "compile" time. Mimicking how a
browser displays a .txt file (to some extent).

Writing posts is as simple as writing a .txt file. All
line breaks and white-space add spacing
(they also aren't condensed into a singular break).

There's no need to worry about formatting, typography,
layout, etc as it will display exactly how it is written.

I can forget about everything and just write!


PORTABILITY

The website should display perfectly in text-based
browsers, browsers like netsurf or dillo and modern
browsers such as Firefox or Chromium.

It can also be viewed using your pager and curl by
appending .txt to each URL which will download the plain
text version (as I wrote it in my text editor).

This entire site will also serve as local documentation for
the distribution through storing the txt files in
/usr/share/doc/kiss.

A Ctrl+A allows you to copy the entire page as plain-text
as another means of locally storing the contents as they
are displayed.


PERFORMANCE

Each page takes up a single 3-10KB~ network request when
there are no images on the page.

The content of each page makes up the majority of the size
so the exact number differs based on how much is written.

Each page is so small that caching the CSS and any other
resources doesn't make sense at all. The overhead of the
surrounding boilerplate is < 1KB in size.

There is no Javascript, analytics or what have you on this
site. It's simply text with the occasional image where
appropriate.


CUSTOMIZATION

The reader has the ability to customize the font and font
sizing through their browser settings as this website will
use whatever the browser settings are.

There is also a tiny amount of CSS to enable a dark theme
if the user's device sends 'prefers-color-scheme:dark'.

@media (prefers-color-scheme:dark) {
  body {
    background: #000;
    color: #fff;
  }

  a {
    color: #6CF
  }
}

The idea is that one can digest the information here in
whatever way they please. Through a terminal browser,
regular browser, text-editor, pager, etc.


THE END

        Dylan