Retrophilia

I've been aware of the Kicks Condor blog for a few months, ever since they linked to one of mine in the spring of 2019. Didn't pay much attention to it however until I started noticing mentions from other bloggers I read. And then, of course, there were the continuing referrals.

Kicks Condor is a blog about the web, but not the bloated monster most of it has become; rather, it's about all those small, quirky, personal websites that thrive in the cracks between corporate giants. The liminal spaces where people increasingly find themselves and each other again. Sure enough, it is one of them, too: built in the spirit of old Geocities, the layout takes a little bit of effort to figure out. Like a cat, it chooses you... if you prove worthy. And of course it's incredibly light beneath all the fluff.

Somehow, it does all that while being thoroughly modern as well, with support for webmentions, microformats and OpenGraph. (Speaking of which: dear web designers, make sure your sites have the kind of metadata people use in the 21st century; conversely, dear app developers, do yourselves a favor and fall back on the good old title and meta description elements when nothing better is available.) There are also all the usual goodies that minimal blogs often do away with nowadays, to their detriment. Such as a good old-fashioned blogroll.

Content-wise, it turns out there's method behind the madness: the dizzying design in fact follows a tumblelog format, with links, quotations and longer posts flowing freely. Where else can you read about Wikipedia on the Dat network, TiddlyWiki experiencing a revival and small personal web directories, all in the very first screenful of text? Scroll down, and you can also find out about someone who decided to ditch apps and craft a blog by hand, out of HTML. I'm not alone!

A site that makes you think, then, and fall in love again with an internet made by people, for people. Together. Gently.

I first got online in 1999. One of the first things I did was to create my first website (on Geocities), painstakingly updated from Internet cafes. When I retired it in 2006 or 2007, the whole thing still fit on two floppy disks. All 20-odd pages, plus some of my early 3D art. Nowadays, that's smaller than the average web page. And it all still works perfectly in a modern browser.

The old art of handcrafted HTML and CSS isn't dead yet. Young people rediscover it all the time. We just don't seem to be so good at finding and promoting those websites that work to keep the old flame alive. Neocities tried to make it a thing again, but they remained an obscure niche for some reason. That's too bad.

Now I find myself on Dreamwidth, along with many new arrivals, and lo! Here, the spirit of the old web never died off. Might have something to do with how the interface invites us to poke at it, change everything and express ourselves. Is it too technical? Maybe. But as I wrote elsewhere, how are newbies going to learn if you don't give them a chance to discover what's possible? So what if that means breaking stuff now and then.

People say it looks ancient. I say it looks clean. People say it lacks features. I say it loads quickly. How much do you need, really? Besides, I thought minimalism was all the rage this side of 2010?

Oh wait, that's just Apple fans. And only when it comes to appearances.

More recently, someone on Mastodon suggested going back to the roots. Defining a subset of HTML that doesn't need a modern, bloated browser engine to render, but something much simpler. To bring back genuine competition.

Something... like what text-based browsers can display?

Let's celebrate those websites that work well in Dillo. They don't even have to give up much. Mine for instance all have Open Graph support. And mobile support. The latter doesn't bother anyone. On the contrary. It makes a website work better for everyone.

Just make sure people can actually read the text, and disable animated GIFs if they need to. Otherwise, the web needs little of what's been piled up on top of its essence for the past decade.