This website is a testbed for various ideas that have been buzzing around in my head, waiting to be let out for work. What you're reading right now how web pages should be: clean, efficient, and fast. They can be made even faster by using Javascript hacks, but the problem is that I can't be hassled to maintain my website when Javascript inevitably does you-know-what in the bed. Later on, I discovered WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) and was thrilled to realize that my web site fulfills all the WCAG standards.
I want you to realize the raw power in our internet technology and how it's being misused by tech giants that want to bog everything down for the stupidest of reasons. Anyway, that's a topic for another page, but I now want to tell you about the range of objectives I intend to fulfill with this website.
This website isn't meant to be pretty or wow you with its fancy CSS — it's meant to be fast to the point you're stunned by it. Everything that's superfluous has been cut out in order to make your actions feel instant. I want you to feel the raw speed so that you're disgusted with deliberately slow loading times of mainstream websites. If only you knew the whole truth...
I don't use any tracking technologies on this website, which means no 3rd-party cookies, ads, Javascript trackers or any kind of trackers or nag popups. The reason why those are used is to monetize traffic, which I do agree is needed to cover website hosting costs, but there is little value in trying to extract fractions of a penny from random visitors.
I deliberately omit hyperlinks leading to other websites because you can be tracked by them. When you follow a hyperlink from one website to another, the origin website may reroute or inject some code into your hyperlink, and the destination website sees where you came from. A website owner might decide "I don't want to be associated with Dejan's schizo writings" and inject some malicious code into links coming to my website, or he can decide to remove the content I am pointing to with hyperlinks or edit it in a way that aggravates my readers, intentionally misrepresents the point of my article, or something else.
Your attention is a limited resource and going online means you're wasting time on silly tasks, such as closing the millionth GDPR cookie warning banner. I value your attention and provide you with information compressed to the utmost degree without any distractions or intrusions. Take your time and savor every word or just scan through it all at your own pace.
This website is perfectly self-sufficient and I intend to keep it that way. I display no ads, I don't advertise any products and I am completely independent of all corporate influence when it comes to choosing what my website looks like. This is editorial independence in the truest sense of the word. In the future, I might consider opening up the contributor section for user essays I find enjoyable where I will only charge a processing fee, but I don't feel pressured to fund my lifestyle from this website.
Copyright is a nasty beast. We should have the right to save, copy, and share digital content, including webpages, for archival purposes, seeing how quickly things online get pruned, edited and censored. I initially thought about this website being completely free of all copyrighted material but that soon turned out to be nearly impossible; I simply can't avoid referencing materials authored by others.
I don't know if making a fully self-referential website is even possible but, in my opinion, keeping this website non-profit will provide it with a strong copyright protection. I promise to do my best to respect copyrighted works of others and only include them where I can also provide a substantial amount of my own context so the result is completely novel. I think the archival aspect of this website should also help keep it out of trouble.
I use no rage-inducing or fear-porn keywords in titles, which is what "news" websites use to keep users coming back in fear, anger, and frustration. I try to write all my titles to explain the entire content of the article so you don't have to click them. I consider my article titles a roadmap that shows the destination and all the major stops in advance. Wherever it is you're headed, you'll get there quickly, privately and without being bothered by ads.
A cousin of mine is red-green blind and told me he can't distinguish between colors on the front page. I tried to tinker with COBLIS and find something that could work for the largest amount of people and still help me retain my color scheme. If the front page seems murky to you, you're probably color blind. The issue most commonly occurs in men, at a rate of about 8%, due to being inherited through the Y chromosome (meaning it's not your fault, so don't fret about it).
I started out with the simplest ideas until realizing there's a set of accessibility standards called "WCAG." To me, it seemed natural and achievable, so I tried to get this website to score flawlessly in all or nearly all of them. Every page on this website is keyboard operable and there are no keyboard traps (elements that trap the cursor and can't be escaped without using the mouse). There are no timed elements that force you to hurry or do an action in a set time limit either.
WCAG guideline 2.4.5 suggests giving the user multiple ways to find content, but I didn't want to add an external search function because of privacy issues — you can always use your browser's native search function on the main page. WCAG also recommends putting a text of sufficient contrast. On my website, it's 7.67:1, which exceeds the WCAG contrast requirements for AAA level (7:1) by 9%.
Clicking or tapping an image will typically lead to a larger version of the same image, with the clicked or tapped image showing a purple outline. I was bothered by it at first but then I found HTML standard section 6.5.6 that stated this outline is very useful to handicapped users because it shows where they are:
Be aware that if an alternative focusing style isn't made available, the page will be significantly less usable for people who primarily navigate pages using a keyboard, or those with reduced vision who use focus outlines to help them navigate the page.
I didn't realize it at first, but this website resembles how Neal Stephenson and William Gibson imagined the content web jockeys who got a direct feed of information to their brains would get. My content's got speed and accessibility that the two only dreamt of. This is what every regular website should look like.
Web technologies get deprecated with lightning speed. The idea for this website is so that you can either make a quick, lightweight snapshot of it and create an image or so that you can easily copy the information and paste it elsewhere.