> Building my own low-javascript website

Hi! My first real post, and I'll be talking about how I made this site itself!

Why make a low-javascript site in the first place? I mean, most if not all people can run javascript nowadays, so why try to limit yourself to just standard css and html? Well, I'll tell you why I did it at least, javascript is slow. Look that's not to say that javascript is evil and horrible or anything of that nature, but I constantly am annoyed when pages take an eternity to load and make a whole bunch of web requests just to load some blog or something. So, with that motivation (plus a curiousity to find out how people do this in the first place), I set out to build a (mostly) javascript-free website.

Firstly, I had to decide what to even write the site in itself. I thought about doing pure html and css all inline, but that sounded like a pain to organize and keep straight, so I decided on a homebrew markdown and html template solution. PostHTML was my transformation tool of choice, and I built and found a series of plugins to aid me with making this site.

Unfortunately, though, posthtml sucks. It took me lots of finagling to get my html to parse, all to resulting in the conclusion that I needed to set the parser's xmlMode to true (one would think an html parser would parse html correctly without that, but that's life I guess). After that, it was honestly incredibly easy. markdown-it to parse the markdown, esbuild to build my js and css, and a buildscript to tie it all together!

I added a few cool things too, like a no javascript theme changer (updates based on system preferences), ipa pronunciation guides, and an automatic post rss-feed. Now, its time for me to, y'know, actually write these posts, by far the hardest part ;P.

See ya!