Emanuel Sprosec


Keep the website simple

15.05.2023

Get rid of the stuff

Perhaps you've already noticed that this website and the CSS style sheet intentionally lack any design elements. After more than 20 years of creating and building websites for others and myself, I've grown tired of the entire process. The modern web has become increasingly bothersome. Most websites are filled with excessive tracking, cookie messages, pervasive advertisements, cheap and commercially driven or AI-generated content, oversized images serving as eye-catching distractions and an abundance of white space with large letters just for the sake of looking "good." More importantly, all this unnecessary content is loaded, resulting in a significant amount of wasted data. This isn't a matter of "It doesn't matter because bandwidth and hardware are cheap nowadays"; it's simply foolish. That's it. And that's precisely why I've stripped down my website. It's enough.

It still works

It functions perfectly in every browser and on every mobile phone. No graphics need to be loaded, and I don't have to worry about changing colors, lines, borders, and other visual elements every two months. I've always appreciated the principles of simplicity, like KISS (Keep it simple, stupid) or YAGNI (You aren't gonna need it). Of course, it could be argued that my perspective is influenced by my age and shifting priorities, as I now focus more on selecting and filtering things that truly matter in my environment. However, in my opinion, this approach also benefits you. You might think, "Alright, this is boring; I made a wrong click." But at least the page loaded quickly and consumed only a few kilobytes of data. Interestingly, the page achieves a perfect 100% score in Google's PageSpeed Insights test for both mobile and desktop views, without any additional effort. I wish more people would publish websites like this.

I still appreciate Maciej Cegłowski's old text on The Website Obesity Crisis (or as funny keynote talk video at Youtube), even though it dates back to 2015. Sadly, in 2023, the problem persists and continues to grow. I no longer wish to contribute to it, so here you have it—a text without unnecessary clutter—for your personal enjoyment and my peace of mind.

Edit: this is also a good one: The HTML Hell Page


Start · Edit · Changes
Last update: 21.05.2023