Optimizing for Text-Mode Browsers

The idea of building websites with extreme simplicity is incredibly attractive and important to me.

I think as a systems engineer, we deal with a lot of complexity at the low level and just want to write about it and not get stuck on CSS and JS/TS configs.

I do think that you're correct that you went too far by supporting browsers that precede IE6. It is not a bad thing generally if you have the time for that.

I'm in the same boat design-wise because I find it incredibly hard to pick colours for light mode and dark mode. Even with the help of Pinterest, it was a difficult task so I abandoned it and went with dark mode.

In general, I admire your willingness to try things out.

Kudos

I love doing stuff like that. CSS grids make it very easy to reorder content. I use it to put the sidebar below the content on https://allaboutberlin.com.

Recently, I added descriptive placeholders for JavaScript widgets. This helps give a bit of context when the browser or agent can't load them. It also means that the PDF printouts include a permalink to the tools that are not loaded.

I frequently test the website with stylesheets turned off. It gives me a rough idea of how reader mode, screen readers and AI agents read my website.