Cool!

> try:
>
> http://w10.host

Looks interesting, and yet - believe it or not - overkill for my needs.

But I appreciate your bringing it to my attention!

But a quick question: how is pure text being served in a way that my browser doesn't consider it html to all be munged together?

I'm not sufficiently experienced to understand how to accomplish that without either a <pre> in an index.html, or self-hosting to add whatever to .htaccess in order to have an index.txt served.

Oh, wow, that's beautiful! I'm loving the relative URL approach, although of course that excludes people unfamiliar with the concept. But then I'm fully in favor people essentially excluding themselves by not raising their game.

I simply copied your top level URL and gave it to elinks. When I wanted to drill down, I 'g' (goto url), pasted what was still in the copy buffer, and tacked on whatever relative path that sounded interesting. And those relative paths being short, curiosity had this here cat visiting all of them. So I think you may have invented a rather coy way to garner more reads. :-)

Holy macaroni!

I appreciate your input, but what you said only amplifies my disgust with html. I'd have not figured out such by searching/browsing online in a proverbial million years, especially as the value/accuracy of content seemingly diminishes faster than a html tag goes obsolete.... ;-)

I'm more convinced than ever that I'm going to put my time/effort into writing, and presenting it in a way that others can parse and render as they like. As for everyone else, as with "natural selection", you don't do the work, you don't reap the benefit(s).

That "million years" comment reminds me that I wasted far too much time trying to figure out what layer is causing strings that look like URL's in my terminal become mouse-click-ably opened by my browser. Is it the xterm variant on my system? Is it tmux? Is it bash within a tmux pane? I spent hours, and came to no useful conclusion. I figured out how to display some terminfo escape sequences that I think are related, but I couldn't find any information on the terminfo entries I was seeing (Ms, Cs, Cr, and Ss).

I got the vague feeling it was an xterm matter, except that the relevant terminfo string crapola was revealed by "tmux show-options -s", so.... <shrugs while wincing and wondering where the wife hid the bottle of Jameson>

> I’m of two minds about this. I’m definitely in favor
> of simplicity, but that’s not the same in my view as
> *nothing*. It’s important not to throw out the baby with
> the bathwater, in other words.

Seems to me this species throws babies out with the amniotic fluid all the time. But that's a different topic.... <coughs nervously>

As for "the more of the onus you put on your user/read to fix things", I've long considered attempting to address the (mathematical) product of peoples' tastes and varying/emerging devices/browsers a fools errand. I could see feeling more responsibility toward that were I providing "Truth" or some shared public resource, but as for a blog, I feel my responsibility ends with the text, because it's providing the one thing others can't come by other than by mind reading: my thoughts. How it looks? Well, anyone who needs it to be formatted a certain way is free to learn how to do that. If that certain way is a show stopper, and they're not willing to make the effort to learn and apply that learning to the text, oh well.

I'm honestly to the point where I wish people were mostly doing something closer to what I've presented: try to provide good content that's *parse-able* for being regular. The more easily parsed, the more others can do with it to their heart's content. It's when the content is mired in gobs of presentation that the reader is hampered, if you ask me - especially given the kind of for-shit html that browsers find a way to render out of a sort of desperation.

As for "accessibility", again, this is merely blogging, not "Truth" or a public service that shouldn't be excluding some. But when it comes to presenting personal thoughts, ease on my end trumps who can decipher it. Per my little parsing rant, I believe I'm making my thoughts accessible to considerably more processing/manipulation/formatting than is someone struggling with layers upon layers of containers for the sake of whizbang visual effects.

> For example, on a 4K screen (like I’m using now), I
> generally find un-formatted text to render too small. It
> also adds extra work to follow links that aren’t rendered
> as such (even if it’s not very much).

Again, my attitude is that if it's too much, then first of all you're won't be missing much, and second of all it wouldn't be the first time that someone missed out on something for not making a little effort. :-)

At what point does making it easier to ride a two-wheeled bike render the activity not really riding a bike? It becomes that kind of ridiculous at a certain point.

> The text size/display issue you mention says to me that
> you hadn’t quite found the best rule(s) to use, up to
> and including what units of measurement you were using.

My text was paragraphs within a single <div> styled to this paltry degree:

div {

max-width: 600px;

}

Like I said in the original post, all the pages included that style sheet via a <link> element in the <head>, and all of them except one behaved identically. That one aberration was coded identically to the others, and I know that both from some semi-exhaustive staring, and from whittling it and a page that rendered as expected down to "diff'able essentials".

And, I mean, the difference was startling. Where as the "correct" pages resized the same, and text-wrapped the same with identical font sizes, the "bad" page displayed with a much smaller font size, and line wrapping didn't happen at all when I minimized the window... it was just cut off at the right window boundary.

I know, I know... it *had* to be something I was doing wrong. But I spent a couple hours trying to figure it out, and part of my deciding my html days were over is that I had to waste that kind of time dicking with such in the first place when the text content itself was far more important.

> I don’t want to sound hyper-critical or anything;
> obviously you do you for your own space.

We're good. Your thoughts helped me clarify mine. Thank you!

> I read your several posts about html and I sympathize. I
> am also using a chromebook, isn't it annoying in chrome,
> when you start typing an url, it automatically autocomplete
> to the most specific, convoluted, and always the least
> useful version of the url that you're typing? If I type
> foo. it completes to foo.bar.baz/res/1231654124/index.html
> FUCK!!! What's the point of having an autocomplete if the
> only thing it's good for is to either delete most of it
> or keep typing the whole url I actually mean to open!?

I've never liked other peoples' ideas of "help" (as in "helping" me). I mostly want others to stay out of the way when I'm trying to create something - or, at most, create things I can leverage if I consider it a magic combination of clever and useful.

But *please* don't "help" me with an enshittified auto-complete, with car doors that lock themselves, with screens that turn themselves off, etc. When I set something up a certain way, I want it to stay that way until I effing die. PERIOD. I can't stand how help is constantly causing me extra work. I can't even back out of a <deity>damned app on the "smart" TV and come pack to other apps/content being in the same places they were when I entered the app. How am I to efficiently investigate such if nothing is where it was the last time I looked? Now I have to search all over the place all over again....

Every now and then I have, um... "species paring down fantasies", and most of the time software developers eek out ahead of even politicians in the sort order.... ;-)

> Anyway, I use the chromebook to use the shitty parts of
> the internet, you know, just for piracy and to sometimes to
> peek into Big sites, which I don't much use anymore anyway.

I use Chrome on my Chromebook for email and other necessary services. But for common browsing it's almost always lynx or elinks in the terminal. I don't have time for page loads on the order of minutes due to all the modern happy horseshit.

> On my tablet I have, on purpose, removed all google stuff
> (of course, I know this is somewhat pointless because
> they can keep profiling me if they want to), and keep the
> factory version of chrome, which doesn't even let me open
> cloudflare apps or even recaptcha. I think sites that use
> cloudflare are just ddosing themselves lmao.

I'm nearer the end of life than the beginning, which means I have less reason to care about profiling and such. I just want things to run efficiently without constantly having to re-up hardware, and I want apps that can access/acquire and output information to file so I can have *my* way with it.

Is prettification *really* a gain over being able to curl, parse "withtout tears", and utilize/render as I like?

Okay. I understand. Not everyone can do such. But I'd argue their experience is lesser for not raising their game to participate in that way. In a way, they've gotten the infinite click/scroll induced mental illnesses they deserve....

> Anyway, I have been thinking of dusting off my old little
> lappy and just install plan9 (I've talked about this
> already) and write my own gemini client and web-scraping
> scripts to use only the sites I like, usually textboards
> and sites mostly without javascript. For a while I've
> wanted to use a mostly-plaintext version of the web, and a
> very plaintext approach to computing in general, the old
> Unix way (not that I'm a unix fanboy but I am a sort of
> minimalist because I can't be bothered to be installing all
> sorts of programs written in all sorts of languages each
> of which needs it's own tooling and... you get the idea.)

I do.

I feel like I've honed a reasonably satisfying environment on Chromebook given the "Terminal" app that presents whatever linux it contains. The "Chrome" browser is there in rare cases it seems a necessity, but I'm mostly enjoying terminal life - which ("terminal life") is actually a bit of a pun, I guess. :-)

That linux seems solid ground that I can refine/adorn in ways I like with Lua scripts.

I was in a blogging mood a few days ago, hence this thread. I started going down a mostly text path due to the Gemini post I think I cited, then thought I should give html another try. There was a bit of "FOMO" to that, as though I'd perhaps not given it a serious enough try in the past to have benefited from whatever it is that keep people hacking away at/with it.

What I mostly learned is I've no longer the patience for the combination of its churn, its seeming "bandaid-land" evolution due to now newer devices find ways to break it, and finally how it creates temptation to put more time/effort into form than substance. It's no lie to say I start out feeling incrementally awakened by inspiring thoughts I wish to share, but end up a steaming pile of frustration for agonizing more over appearance than message, especially knowing in advance how few people are going to read it anyway due to my not participating in the whore-ish environments one must to get noticed online.

Oh well.... :-)

Yes, Gemini facilitates more focus on content. But I found the newness of the protocol has created a space that seemed "smol" to the point of clique-y. (Or maybe the reality is it attracts people less inclined to interact, which can come off as clique-y?)

It hit me that there's nothing wrong with the far more ubiquitous http[s], that I could maybe benefit from its wider audience (read: have a greater chance of encountering people more notionally compatible with me) without having to endure its most painful aspect for me: literally becoming hyper about text. :-)