Fast and Beautiful, a Static Website is a Superior Website

The original founders of the major programming languages and computer systems are still alive today. They’ve had every opportunity to change with the times. They, after all, know innovation. They inspired us. They still do.

Lets look at websites of the great masters in 2020 and take a lesson:

Bjarne Stroustrup (C++)

How he centered his picture, I will never know…

https://www.stroustrup.com/ (archive)

Welcome to Bjarne Stroustrup’s homepage!

Richard Stallman (GNU General Public License)

Regularly updated…

https://stallman.org/ (archive)

Richard Stallman’s Personal Site

Linus Torvolds (Linux)

Ignore this one. He’s obviously trolling us … for the last … 20 … years.

https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/torvalds/ (archive Aug 17 2000) (archive Aug 19 2020)

The homepage of a WWW-illiterate

Guido van Rossum (Python)

I’m sure this site is running Django or Flask, at least.

https://gvanrossum.github.io/ (archive)

Guido van Rossum - Personal Home Page

I’ll never understand a Jackson Polloc painting, but I do understand this art shown above.

The first two guys listed have very valid reasons for making their sites this way, distilled down perfectly to the last drop of the purest logic. The last two guys are just trolling us.

I was going to list Mark Zuckerberg’s homepage (archive 1) (archive 2) (archive 3) but it turns out he is sharing it with about 2.7 billion other people. It also presented compatibility issues by being listed on the same page with Richard Stallman.

Why Basic Flat HTML Sites Are Best for Most of Us

HTML Site = Longevity

Being a zealous Christian, I’m a big fan of longevity. And, to me, there is nothing more enduring on the web than a basic HTML website.

You can host an HTML site, literally, for FREE, beautiful and complex…and it will be here later on when future post-world-war-3 generations finally find the GitHub Archive Program (archive) (provided you use GitHub Pages (archive), I think…).

Lets be realistic. If you are like most people, you will probably abandon your site when you realize its pointless. But if you did it in HTML, it will still be here 20 years from now, even if you never touched it again. Just ask Linus Torvolds.

(WordPress and other CMS’s will not do that for you…)

Static Sites Can Handle Traffic

If you go viral and get inundated with traffic, an HTML flat site can handle it. Even if its running on a Raspberry Pi (archive). By comparison, statistically speaking, CMS’s that begin with the letter “W” can crash a high-end dedicated server under the same conditions.

Faster Sites Keep Attention

A static HTML page is lighting fast. And since all humans presently living have ADD audience retention will always be at max with an HTML site.

In fact, my illustrator’s site of 24,000 images (archive) (produced via graphical spam methods) doesn’t even need a search bar, since users can page through the images so fast.

Indistinguishable from Dynamic Sites

Because of new web technologies, you can actually run a store on a flat HTML site. You can have a contact form (a Guestbook?!), and user comments. Alot has changed.

HTML Sites are Pro-Sanity

Databases, plugins, environments, ports, updates, downdates, backwards compatibility…this list could be very long… all gone. Along with your mental oppression. Just upload the files and be done with it.

This means you will have much more time for your more basic human needs, such as finding time to look at cat memes.

Because in the end, the internet was not created for you. It exists for cat memes.