Last updated: January 31, 2026

January 31, 2026

On This Page

1. Why the small web?
2. Dear internet: more plain HTML, CSS, and Javascript please
3. HTML is not ugly
4. Commercialisation of the web
5. Summary
6. Leave a comment

Why the small web?

It’s been almost four years since I first published my first website on Neocities (April 2022). I wanted to review parts of my old web manifesto, which I ended up removing when I redesigned the website in 2024, but was one of the first web pages I made on Pixel Glade.

If you want to read the original web manifesto, it’s on the Wayback Machine.

The very first thing I talked about was I was having trouble with social media addiction My Unhealthy Relationship with Social Media, often spending hours every day just scrolling. I then reminesced on the old fansites I remember finding on Geocities, Angelfire, and Tripod, which were old web hosting services. It was remembering this old web that made me want to find that old web again made by real people, with real feelings, without the corporate structures in place that prioritise things differently to me.

It’s 2026 now, and I still struggle with social media addiction. Since I’ve switched to Linux it’s more of a problem on Desktop since I don’t have the Cold Turkey Blocker app anymore. The best I’ve managed to do is try replace social media with other activities, but I still feel myself becoming upset if I haven’t checked my usual subreddits every day. It’s honestly disturbing to me that my mind is even capable of feeling this way. I think some of it is FOMO (fear of missing out). Also, there is news I can’t seem to find unless I get it on reddit or Lemmy. Maybe I’m just bad at browsing news sites. The news is so depressing sometimes it’s hard to bother trying to curate it.

Is the small web a good respite for me from social media? Yes, I find the interactions more genuine and keeping busy on projects keeps me away from social media. I think the UI of social media is a part of that, I often feel like I’m in a cramped crowded space in social media feeds. It’s kind of the point, but I decided I actually don’t like this. It’s kind of like window shopping over people’s (online) lives...? I probably won’t buy anything, but I’ll enjoy the process of looking. Sometimes you learn something interesting. I’m usually a lurker and not much of a participant.

Dear internet: more plain HTML, CSS, and Javascript Please

Before finding Neocities, I had a Wordpress blog and I was incredibly frustrated with the experience which is what lead me to delete it and start again fresh, here. I wanted to find the creativity within myself to make a personal website and also challenge myself to learn a new skill (web development), focusing on accessibility especially as it was something I encountered as a barrier online. Even last year, I did a really short course on Web Design on Wordpress (begrudgingly), because that’s what all the job advertisements look for. I’ve been to interviews where they ask about my Wordpress experience, it seems to be the main thing that digital agencies use because clients like it and it’s fast (to develop). When you filter Wordpress themes by accessibility there’s less than a single page. That’s horrible considering the number of Wordpress themes available.

Last year I also did some online tutorials on PhP and Javascript, trying to avoid WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors, trying to stick to vanilla Javascript. Editors like Wordpress which is a WYSIWYG editor often impose their own limitations through their UIs and in the process, also include anti-accessible design by excluding the ability to add aria labels and things like that through the interface, as if they don’t exist. It would require prior knowledge and editing the raw HTML to fix it but it really just feels like it’s hiding it out of the way. It’s disappointing to me that web design today prioritises frameworks so much. I know back in the late 1990’s most websites used a combination of Perl, PhP, HTML, and Javascript. It seems like it’s easier to get an accessible website when you start from the ground-up rather than going sideways by adopting someone else’s code.

One of the video tutorials on Wordpress I did on a popular online site didn’t even encourage users to use alt text. The tutor was making accessibility mistakes all over the place like using heading tags because they wanted larger text, saying alt text can be ignored, and it honestly just made me feel really angry how this teacher is propagating bad practice to new designers.

As part of that short course I had to set up a Wordpress site on my domain. It really ate up the CPU and storage space too, along with lagging really badly. I’m on a light-weight hosting plan and it’s more than enough for my usual needs, but installing Wordpress made it apparent you’d need a higher storage space. That seems to be a waste of resources and money (to me). I was glad to be rid of it.

HTML is not ugly

This relates to one of my other headings in my original web manifesto: Minimal HTML/CSS Is Fast. Yes they can be very fast but there’s more to HTML than just its speed. It seems like online when people outside of the small web talk about plain HTML like it’s ugly or not pretty enough. However, I disagree. HTML is fast, simple, and easy to use. It’s beautiful because its good qualities are to show information. There’s nothing like a plain static HTML site with some CSS to tie it all together. Provided you abide by some organisational principles and basic accessibility considerations, HTML sites can be wonderful.

I noticed while I was reading gemlogs (part of the Gemini Project) that I felt very relaxed. I didn’t feel overwhelmed or feel cramped like I do on social media interfaces. Is it because HTML-like minimal markup is boring? Maybe! Maybe social media should be more boring. Maybe part of the reason social media is so addictive is because it’s not boring enough. On Gemini I feel like I’m picking spiral bound notebooks off shelves that different people have written in, then put them away. The room is plain, maybe a study area. Social media by contrast is like a busy city street full of dazzling arcades and flashing signs and advertising.

Gemlog aggregators like Antenna or Cosmo make it easy to pick out sites to read. It’s part of the design philosophy of Gemini to be bare bones a lot like early HTML and CSS sites and I think it’s a great idea and understand why people want to make their sites like that. It also made me realize that choosing to reveal the structure of HTML in your design is a design philosophy and HTML shouldn’t be considered some kind of relic of an older, prior age that society has moved on from.

I actually found my new Android phone launcher through a gemlog, someone talked about OLauncher. It converts your home screen into about 5 chosen apps that appear as text lists. It’s not as overwhelming as the default screen full of app icons.

Commercialisation of the web

Neocities has been banned by Bing for unknown reasons. Thankfully, when I checked, Duck Duck Go still seems to show results for neocities websites despite using some code from Bing. I don’t know the details, I will just say attempts to stop independent websites from being indexed online is a mistake (unless people are doing that on purpose with their robots.txt file, but I doubt that’s the case here).

In my web manifesto one of the headings was I Want Answers Not Your eBook, recipe websites are particularly egregious for this. Unfortunately this has not changed at all and tracking based advertising is still a problem. There also has been a large number of data leaks lately of which some of my information has been leaked. Since before I installed Linux I started deleting old accounts and trying to cull some of the other-alias email addresses I had accumulated that were inactive or not necessary. I think I managed to reduce my 300-and-something list of accounts to about half or a third. That’s good but I could do better. Some accounts can’t be deleted at all, because they don’t allow it or have the tools for it (obviously problematic). Most let you though.

My Future Web Looks Like...

On my original manifesto I made a list of things I wanted to see on the web more:

• creativity
• personality
• fun
• curiosity
• curation
• accessibility

While I agree with this, I’d like to make a revised list of what I want to see:

• websites coded with basic tools
• your code and data belong to you
• self-expression
• yourself (thoughts, emotions, not just what you’ve made)
• accessibility, because the web belongs to everyone
• the ability to leave a comment without making an account / logging in

By simple tools, I mean not using WYSIWYG editors because they take freedom away from you. I mean some degree of hand-coding and keeping templates for yourself. When I first moved to Linux I started using Emacs, but I started getting finger joint pain from the shortcuts so I started using Geany instead (which in terms of the UI is like Notepad++ without the recent bloat Microsoft added to it). I still use Emacs when I need to do a mass search and replace across multiple files (there’s a command called find-name-dired for that) though.

I find myself appreciating the importance of keeping my data safe more. There are too many data leaks, too many platforms imposing flawed age-checking strategies, and very little government oversight (except in Europe, Australia has a long way to catch up though). So I’m trying to make fewer accounts with fewer sites.

Websites should be about yourself, in the end. That’s what we use social media for, but you can do it better on your own website. So make it yours - not just the content, but the construction. It can be self-expression but it can also just be how you want to present your information. It doesn’t need to exist for the purpose of self-expression, just sharing information like the web was designed for.

The last point on being able to leave anonymous comments is why I have a very open system for comments where you don’t need an account. Sure, I have had over 200 spam messages sent through them so far (PhP comment forms seem to attract them), but it’s worth it for the genuine comments I do get. Someone commented as Guest recently on my blog which made me so happy. You’re all my guests! You’re allowed to be a guest. You can view the site content without an account, and you can leave whenever you want and you probably don’t need to visit again tomorrow. That’s what RSS is for.

I saw an online magazine called the Good Internet Magazine, which has a subscription option and only let you comment if you make an account. That seems like the antithesis of an open web - or at least, the web I’d like to see. Ironic, considering what it’s for. The subscription? Sure, it’s a magazine, a Subscribe and Log In makes sense for keeping track of orders and purchases. But Sign In and Subscribe are the largest and most legible buttons on the page if you’re at the top. Why do I need to go to a different page to see the latest issue cover? Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad there’s a website for this which is why I signed up for the newsletter, but why do we need to make an account to post a comment?

Also, the insertion of genAI summaries in search and propagation of AI slop articles, images, and videos can’t die fast enough.

If you’re reading this and you don’t know how to make a website, you can borrow a book from the library - seriously, there’s heaps of them. Even something from 20 years ago would help get you started, and the web is very forgiving of code from earlier times. Once you get started, you’ll learn enough to find better resources for yourself, dependent on your goals. Accessibility makes more sense when you have the basics of HTML and CSS under your belt.

Summary

I reviewed some key points from my web manifesto from 2022, and added new ones. Lately, it seems like the web gets worse all the time, but I feel happy and proud when I think of all the people on Neocities, or Nekoweb, or off-site in the indie web satelite making their own websites and trying to support a healthy internet ecosystem. We need more sites like Neocities and Nekoweb and spaces like the Gemini Protocol. We should keep trying to remember what HTML is for. For sharing information and expressing ourselves as humans, not to turn ourselves into products.

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