25 October 2025
One of these days in 2025 I was struggling w/ one of those modern website builders.
You know, one of those, that are supposed to make things easier.
They don't.
Or they do. If you do not know what you want. Or if you are so much inside the box, that you like what they give you.
I am neither.
So I suddenly remembered, that when the Internet became publicly available in the mid-90s I was in my early 20s. And we learned to write html. w/ our bare hands.
So I basically remembered, that I am actually quite good at html and the realisation stunned me. How far had the complication of the world taken me.
Then I looked at the masses of websites. Rectangulars next to rectangulars next to rectangulars. Something I could do in pure html in the matter of minutes. Has probably taken designers and programmers ages.
I do not want to be disrespectful. There are good websites. But most are terrible. And overteched. We have sacrificed the content for the look and for the technocrat. And all the distraction distracts from the written word. Or worse — compensates for the lack of quality in the written text.
Or even worse — replaces it w/ things without meaning.
I had, of course, a thought of fear. Of course. Am I too old? Am I going backwards.
I thought about that for a moment and decided, that I am not. It was a personal decision w/o much of a proof. Only later, when I was writing this article I remembered, that LaTeX is written the same way. I was not going backwards. I was going forwards and taking my website to a scientific level.
And not only to a scientific level, but to a level where I brave to write without the distraction. Without the beautification. I should have put it in quotation marks. I will not.
The manual printing press workshops developed by Célestin Freinet are upheld until today by the Humboldt University of Berlin. There is power in the written word. There is power in taking a word appart letter by letter. In putting it back together. In turning words around.
The html was originally designed to resemble the printing press. This makes it in a way so weird. Many concepts in it come from printing on paper and are not made for screen.
That's also the reason why there are so many html frameworks. Because people cannot comprehend the pure html. But that's not the point of this article.
The reader might wonder, if I am that good at html, why is that article so ugly. It is not ugly. It is text. Text one reads. And then imagines things. You do not need things on the screen in order to imagine.