Web brutalism

In a digital era where everything web must be flashy, interactive and addictive, pages as simple and plain as these you're reading could seem strange. However, it's exactly as a reaction against the moern web that I've decided to adopt a kinda "brutalist" style for this digital garden. Contents should be more important than the boxes they're into. Form matters less than function.

The general popularity of Markdown as a web language broadly follows this idea, that isn't exactly new. But Markdown is another example of simplicity by abstraction. Being able to describe a page without html codes is nice, but it needs a layer of translation to html, nonetheless. Try to install even a flat CMS that supports Markdown and you could lose yourself in modules, php code, dependencies. The "simple solution" isn't simple at all. That said, of course any flat CMS with Markdown is infinitely better than a gigantic wordpress installation just for a simple text blog.

My dislike for "fake simplicity" led me to the simplest solution: apache, html, a simple css file and that's all. Html pages are composed directly in a text editor and then uploaded online using good old ftp. Nothing fancy, nothing flashy.

The only logical alternative to this brutalist approach is, probably, Gemini. But managing a Gemini capsule is a different thing from managing some web pages. And the geminiverse is for sure entertaining but still not that popular. However, these pages can be esaily converted to Gemini contents.

Back to Navigation
Back to main