35. Long live the open web
A new essay and new project affirm the power of HTML and the open web.
I have a new essay for Untapped on building websites with HTML and CSS for twenty years. Here’s how it opens:
A few months ago, I needed to make some changes to my website. What started as simple content edits—updating my biography, adding projects to my portfolio—quickly spiraled into a bigger project. New content types required new templates. My website is hand-built; I don’t use a content management system or an off-the-shelf-platform. Before I knew it, I was staying up late, rethinking the content architecture from the ground up.
I’ve been making websites for 20 years, and have been building and rebuilding my own website for just as long. I taught myself HTML when I was 15 by clicking “View Source” in my web browser, then copying and pasting snippets of code to hack together simple web pages until they looked good and functioned properly. Since then, I’ve used HTML (albeit in a more sophisticated capacity) and CSS, another coding language, to make nearly every website I’ve ever worked on. It recently dawned on me that many of the design tools I used when I began my career are now obsolete or have radically changed. Updating my website these last few months, I sometimes felt like I was 15 again.
Websites are perhaps the only type of design project I can work on the same way I did when I was a teenager. Figma didn’t exist, nor did any of the other upstart design software companies that have come and gone over the years. The Adobe Creative Suite looks increasingly unrecognizable to me, and I’m often unable to open files I created in previous versions. As an undergraduate design student, I took three required classes on Adobe Flash, software that, at the time, felt like the future of web design before it fell out of favor a few years later.
It’s a weird piece, honestly. It’s one of the more personal things I’ve written but it’s also a piece of technology criticism, a meditation on tools, and how we make things that last. In addition to my own story, I spoke to Paul Ford and Laurel Schwulst for the piece and was happy to have their voices woven into the narrative. You can read the whole thing here.
I’ve been wanting to write a version of this piece for a few years but could never get it quite right. I didn’t want this piece to be nostalgic; to feel like a call to return to some previous web era. I didn’t want it to read as a value judgement nor as a call to action for everyone to build their own websites. (Many thanks to Tiffany Jow for her editing and confidence in the piece. It means a lot.) The crux, as the piece opens, was this realization that I was still building websites in essentially the same way I always had and there was no other process in my work that has remained so unchanged. We don’t think of designing for the web as lasting, yet here we are.
This comes at a moment when designing for the web feels like it’s falling out of favor. When I was in school, the debate was whether designers should learn to code. In many ways, that debate is still ongoing — it seems many design programs are teaching less coding again, as designing websites isn’t as sexy as designing an app. And when you are designing an app, design students can do some complex interaction in a Figma prototype. It seems to me that something is lost in this shift, there still must be some value in understanding HTML and CSS. There still must be some value in the open web.
Last year, Robin Rendle wrote about how embarrassing the web has become, bemoaning the lack of design, details, and care it seems to have lately. He’s not wrong. We’ve — as designers, design institutions, etc — turned our back from the web in many ways. I’ve long felt a desire to return to the open web — I wrote about right here on my blog five years ago!
I was pleased to see this piece come out just a few days after Kyle Chayka’s latest New Yorker column, on the return of homepages:
The major social platforms operated for a long time like digital big-box stores for media content, offering a little of everything all at once. Twitter, especially, served as a one-stop shop for news and entertainment among a certain kind of very online user. In the twenty-tens, the conventional wisdom was that content was best distributed to consumers by social platforms through algorithmically personalized recommendations. You read whatever news surfaced in your Facebook or Twitter feeds. News articles circulated as individual URLs, floating in the ether of social-media feeds, divorced from their original publishers. With rare exceptions, home pages were reduced to the role of brand billboards; you might check them out in passing, but they weren’t where the action lay.
Now digital-distribution infrastructure is crumbling, having become both ineffective for publishers and alienating for users. Social networks, already lackluster sources for news, are overwhelmed by misinformation and content generated by artificial intelligence. A.I.-driven search threatens to upend how articles get traffic from Google. Text-based media have given way to short-form videos of talking heads hosted on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. If that’s not how you prefer to take in information, you’re out of luck. Surrounded by dreck, the digital citizen is discovering that the best way to find what she used to get from social platforms is to type a URL into a browser bar and visit an individual site. Many of those sites, meanwhile, have worked hard to make themselves feel a bit more like social media, with constant updates, grabby visual stimuli, and a sense of social interaction. Patel told me, “What we needed to do was steal moves from the platforms.”
Perhaps the platform era caused us to lose track of what a Web site was for. The good ones are places you might turn to several times per day or per week for a select batch of content that pointedly is not everything. Going there regularly is a signal of intention and loyalty: instead of passively waiting for social feeds to serve you what to read, you can seek out reading materials—or videos or audio—from sources you trust. If Twitter was once a sprawling Home Depot of content, going to specific sites is more like shopping from a series of specialized boutiques.
Chayka’s tackling a parallel idea to my piece: as the web (and our digital lives) are increasingly platform-ized, we’re continually at the mercy of those platforms. Chayka looks at this through the lens of homepages, which had largely been overlooked as traffic increasingly was coming from social feeds, are important again in a way they haven’t been in years. As these platforms crumble, we’re due, I think, for a web renaissance. As Paul Ford told me, “The web is still the best document-distribution platform in the history of the world.”
This is why I still build my websites myself. This is still why I still publish a blog. This is why everything is still logged on my own website. This is also why, after posting photography on Instagram for the last decade, I just launched a brand new website: jarrettfuller.photo.
Over the last few years, I’ve increasingly felt like Instagram was not the place to post and share photography anymore. I always include recent photographs in my newsletter but wanted a dedicate place for photography. So as I was writing about HTML, I was building a brand new website with HTML and CSS, just like I always have.
I’ve been interested in photography, like HTML, for twenty years. Its one of my longest running hobbies and much of my early photographic education came from photoblogs. Daily Dose of Imagery and Naz Hamid’s Absenter (both no longer active) were daily visits for me. This new site, which is a static site powered by Jekyll like all my sites are as are, is an homage to those, designed based on my memory of the feeling of those sites.
Each image is on its own page with metadata on the bottom. There’s an RSS feed if you want to keep up with it. Maybe I’ll experiment with email too. I don’t suspect it’ll get the traffic an Instagram account would but that’s okay. Part of it exists just so I could design a new site. Part of it is so I can own my own turf. And part of it is because I still love the power of the open web.
I really enjoyed Terry Eagleton’s new essay in The London Review of Books on where culture comes from. This graf gets to why I got so taken with Hegel and Marx in graduate school:
Hegel and Marx have an answer of a kind to the problem of clashing self-fulfilments, which goes like this: realise only those capabilities which allow others to do the same. Marx’s name for this reciprocal self-realisation is ‘communism’. As the Communist Manifesto puts it, the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. When the fulfilment of one individual is the ground or condition of the fulfilment of another, and vice versa, we call this love. Marxism is about political love. I mean love, of course, in its real sense – agape, caritas – not the sexual, erotic, romantic varieties by which late capitalist society is so mesmerised. We’re speaking of the kind of love that can be deeply disagreeable and isn’t necessarily to do with feeling, that is a social practice rather than a sentiment, and which is in danger of getting you killed.
Eagleton’s book Why Marx Was Right was revelatory and transformative for me. I’ve recommended it more times than I can count.
The new St. Vincent album, All Born Screaming, has been on repeat around here since it came out. As a fan of her’s since her debut, I was surprised by how it was for me to get into her last album. This one, however, feels very much like a return to form while still pushing into new directions. In my opinion, it gets better with repeated listens. (I could write this whole paragraph again replacing St. Vincent with Vampire Weekend, whose new album feels the same way to me.)
I’ve also been listening to a lot of Guided by Voices and Arthur Russell lately. GBV, for some reason, is my go-to yard work band; a perfect soundtrack to work outside all day too. What strikes me about both GBV and Russell is they were — or are, in GBV’s case — so prolific that I feel like I haven’t even made a dent in their catalogs despite being a fan for years. I love this about them; this sense that music goes on forever.
As someone who makes a living, at least in part, by interviewing people, I enjoyed this conversation between David Marchese and Emmanuel Olunkwa — two great interviewers — where they talk shop for November Magazine.
I also like listening to editors talk about their work and appreciated this Ezra Klein episode with former New York Magazine editor David Moss. (For another editor-podcast episode, I recommend Talk Easy’s episode with David Remnick.)
I try to read everything Olivia Laing writes but I’m especially interested when she’s writing about gardens. She has a new essay in the New York Times on gardens, historically, as a place of exclusion. She always has a new book coming out this year, The Garden Against Time, which I cannot wait to get my hands on. (For more, here’s an essay from her 2019 essay collection Funny Weather on Derek Jarman’s garden.)
The Future Observatory, based at London’s Design Museum, has launched a new online journal edited by Justin McGuirk. I’m excited to dig into this writing!
I’ve been a fan and admirer of Miranda July and her work for almost fifteen years now so I’m very excited about her upcoming novel, All Fours, especially after reading this profile. I found Kelefa Sannah’s triangulating a philosophy of animal rights for The New Yorker thoughtful and challenging.
There’s a lot to think about in this long conversation about repairing architecture education with Jorge Otero-Pailos that is applicable across design education.
The semester is officially over and I’m transitioning into my summer routines. Gary Shteyngart had a fun piece in The New Yorker about martinis, of which I’ll be making many this summer. I have some projects to work on, some yard work to do, some reading to catch with, and some fun things to think about.
From Raleigh,
J
This is a yearly or at least bi-yearly thing for me. After having at least one hand-made website in the go from the late 90’s to the mid-2000s, I started to let go of them or converted them to use Wordpress or some other cms. And then in fits of frustration with the “ease” of “managed content” I would tear down sites and make static “pure” HTML/CSS sites again.
But then I spent more time just posting images and short missives to Twitter or Instagram as everyone else did. And of course the relative death of casual RSS reading after Google Reader was killed meant fewer people could find webpages without some extra friction.
So now here I am an artist and designer that has a website (Wordpress blargh) and still has a few scattered static sites that no one goes to. And now a “newsletter” on Substack. And Substack has all the hallmarks of what platforms eventually do to the possibility of community.
So now I’m back at the “should my website be static again?” question. It’s the web designer’s ouroboros.