Retro: Rock It!

I dug into the Wayback Machine to try to find when I first added JavaScript support to my company pages at Subsume. It was 2004. Even then, I was late to the game, because by 1999 I had already been using it for sites I was developing for a marketing client.

When I did the Impossibly Stupid RAGtag redesign back in 2015, I included JavaScript under the "retro" umbrella, because it does have a decades-long history. But, still, it is Web 2.0; Web 1.0 is none more retro . . .

I got it in my mind recently to finally do a RAGtag redesign of the corporate site and, you know me, I wondered what I could create without using even JavaScript. I'm deep in React work all day long as it is, and so the less code of my own I have to maintain, the better.

That wasn't enough for me either: I also wanted to get rid of HTML! I'm not crazy, of course, and completely realize that the web and HTML are essentially synonymous. I'm just frankly tired of having to maintain the "tag" part of RAGtag, given that 95% of what I write can be annotated using more basic text formats like Markdown. Or, for more data-centric pages, structured formats like YAML.

Similar to the CI/CD pipeline I talked about for the calendaRSS site, the necessary HTML pages get generated from their source files. I'm doing this so much now that I'm even thinking of pulling out another retro tool to handle that part: Make!

The result is what you now see (and sometimes don't see) at https://www.subsume.com. I went full retro on the stylistic choices as well, settling on a large monospace font, with code examples being in green, of course! The best part is that source files sit right along side the generated HTML files, so that in a Web 4.0 future, your browser is welcome to render those pages how you want to see them rather than how I want to show them to you.