I've decided (perhaps stupidly) to eschew existing static site
generators and documentation templating systems. It seems fitting to
reinvent the wheel, which is something this project is entirely about
doing. The actual justification is a drama in a few very pathetic
parts:
a) existing documentation tools and static site generators are written
primarily in other programming languages. It feels bad to have a
dependency on a completely separate programming language ecosystem to
build the documentation.
b) existing documentation tools on average do a lot of things I don't
like. Things like trying to haul in google analytics and fonts and in
general having a truckload of javascript jammed in the frontend. The
page should have minimal or (ideally) no javascript at all.
c) modern documentation generators have really standardized on a three
column layout that looks flashy but doesn't make very good use of
space, and I think there's room to experiment with some ideas I've
seen while looking around.
So here we are. The approach being taken is to hand-roll html+css
directly, and that will hopefully converge to something that isn't
garbage. Once that has run its course, I will start considering what
level of automation makes sense to add.
Important takeaways:
1. Modern CSS is absurdly complex. It has had so many features jammed into
it over the years, it's completely nuts. I don't think it's possible
for any single person to store the details of all of it in their head.
2. Using non-tiny fonts takes up a lot of room quite quickly. Even if
you want to have a column larger than 800px, it's very easy to run out
of space quickly.
3. there's more than one way to make a list in ascii.
