I had to babysit the pets yesterday while getting new windows installed in my study, bathroom, and sunroom, so I spent it tinkering with this website. Mainly the CSS, but I got around to switching over to using WEBP images instead of JPEG and PNG. I’m shelving AVIF support until Microsoft gets their shit together and updates Edge to support AVIF.
Which will happen right after Tor offers me a book contract and I win the World Fantasy Award – aka the first Tuesday after Ragnarök.
Yes, last week I was using Simple CSS. A couple of weeks before that I was doing a full-screen layout. Now I’m doing something different. Everything left-aligned, with most elements indented relative to headings. That’s how lynx
renders web pages and I liked it enough to reproduce that behavior in graphical browsers. I also missed the green-on-black dark mode my old CSS had.
Why mess around with this? Because it’s my website and I damned well can. That’s the thing with most parasocial media platforms. Out of all of the big platforms, only MySpace allowed people any sort of aesthetic freedom in how their profile pages looked. All the others enforced the sort of uniformity that used to have totalitarians from the 1940s creaming their dress fatigues.
Also, as Simone suggested a few weeks ago, it’s important to know what to delete and when. For example, images: I was using the <picture>
element to support modern formats with fallbacks to older formats, but that caused unexpected behavior with iOS content blockers. So now I just generate WEBP from JPEG and PNG sources, and only use <img>
tags with WEBP. It should render faster, use less bandwidth, and still be compatible with all of the major browsers.
Even Edge. Not that Microsoft pays me to give a shit about Edge, but whatever. I have no idea what browsers my visitors are using and it’s none of my business anyway. I shouldn’t write off a browser just because of its provenance. Though it’s really tempting to only target Firefox because it’s the only major that isn’t entirely proprietary.
And lynx
. Because if my website doesn’t work in lynx
then it just doesn’t fucking work. Really, there’s absolutely no excuse for a static website with a blog to not work in lynx
. It doesn’t even use JavaScript. And if it does work in lynx
then there’s a reasonable chance that it will be fairly accessible to people using assistive technologies like screen readers.
(Yes, this means that web applications that depend on JS don’t work in lynx
, either, and probably aren’t as accessible as they should be.)