SenWerks - Stuff by Sen

It's a pretty well known fact* that the World Wide Web (and arguably humanity itself) peaked in 1999, and it has been downhill ever since. Sure, computers and tech have gotten better "technically" since then, but let's be real, everything else has gone to crap. Websites went from fun expressions of individual personality and mass sharing of information with the intent of becoming all of humanities knowledge at your finger tips, to gargantuan piles of garbage manufactured to brainwash, manipulate, and destroy society all for the sake of making a few rich people richer.

All of our devices, apps, and appliances spy on us 24/7 and harvest every ounce of data possible. Every interaction with technology is an effort against user-hostile UIs designed specifically to fight you doing what you want to do, and force you to do what they want you to do. Websites went from squeazing out every single possible byte of performance to give you as much content as possible, as fast as possible, to now taking dedicated servers running massive stacks of software with hundreds of dependencies to serve you what could be delivered via a .txt file.

None of this is new to anyone who experienced the before/after of the corporate takeover, but sitting down to rebuild my stale blog so I can get back into sharing some projects made me think about "What does my website need?"... and realising my (and most) websites still need very very little. Yes there's exceptions, Netflix isn't going to work as static HTML, but short of complex web-based interactive applications, a vast majority of websites are still just there to deliver some text and images to the users. You know what does that really well? HTML. Pure, simple, original HTML.

The same HTML that worked in 1999 still works today.

This website adapts to all hardware and screen sizes, works on all browsers (including text-only, no-JS, screen-readers, etc), loads blazingly fast, and has very few dependencies, eg zero.

This website isn't broken, it's perfect.

This whole thing is pretty tongue in cheek. I love what modern technology has given us, especially the hardware, but as a web developer of 30 years, I honestly despise where the web itself has gone. This website is me giving up on making new websites with new technology, and going back to where I started. It does everything I need.

Now get off my lawn.

*Says the author, who also peaked in 1999 and is therefore a bit biased.