Building with basic mediums, from HTML to 2x4s, can be a way to assert autonomy and longevity.
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.
I never used Flash outside of those classes. But a website? My tools of the trade remain unchanged. I can pull out an old hard drive, drag index.html to my browser, and there’s the site again, looking more or less exactly how I designed it. The web designer Peter Ström noted this phenomenon, writing on his own website a few years ago: “It is 2022, and I am still—or maybe again?—making websites the same way I have done for 25 years, with HTML and CSS and some basic JS [Javascript] and it is beautiful. The medium still works. The web is wonderful.”
Part of this is because HTML and CSS are open-format languages, meaning they have publicly published specifications that can be used by anyone. “The beauty of HTML is that these standards accrete,” the writer, programmer, software entrepreneur, and web veteran Paul Ford told me. “They don’t replace, but add to. It’s cumulative.”
HTML, an initialism for HyperText Markup Language, gives a website structure. For example, when a web browser sees <body>, it tells the website where the content will begin; <p> denotes that a new paragraph is beginning. CSS, short for Cascading Style Sheets, gives the site style. With CSS, you can tell a website that a text box should be 1200 pixels wide, for example, or that the page’s background color should be #ed1c24 (a color code for red).
A website is essentially a bundle of HTML and CSS files that are linked together on a server. We access these files in a browser like Chrome or Safari via a URL, such as untappedjournal.com. I like to think of HTML and CSS like the 2x4 in construction: When the nail gun replaced the hammer or the power drill replaced the screwdriver, they changed the context, speed, and process of building a home—but the 2x4 is still the most stable structure.
And, like building a building, building a website has evolved. There have been browser updates, faster internet speeds, and updates to the coding languages, each bringing new capabilities to working on the web. Yet the simplicity—and the accessibility—of HTML and CSS means that one can still build a functional website without any modern devices. “In many ways, it’s easier than ever to get started making a website because the tools are available,” Ford says. “The web is still the easiest document-distribution platform that has ever existed.”
“I like to think of HTML and CSS like the 2x4 in construction: When the nail gun replaced the hammer or the power drill replaced the screwdriver, they changed the context, speed, and process of building a home—but the 2x4 is still the most stable structure.”
But the web isn’t just documents built with HTML and CSS anymore. The open web has been replaced by apps—services, functions, and tools—that are built in a variety of programming languages and often platform specific, at the mercy of its operating system updates. Even the websites we’ve long visited are increasingly platform-ized. “The web that many connected to years ago is not what new users will find today,” wrote Tim Berners-Lee, one of the inventors of the internet, on its 29th birthday. “What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms. This concentration of power creates a new set of gatekeepers, allowing a handful of platforms to control which ideas and opinions are seen and shared.”
Content management systems, such as Wordpress or Squarespace, have made designing and publishing on the internet easier than ever—but they’ve also obscured the simplicity of HTML and CSS pages. As the capabilities of internet browsers have increased, so too have the tools increased in complexity. It would be much harder for a 15-year-old today to View Source and understand the code structure that built the website they’re on. Every site is layered with analytics, code snippets, javascript plugins, CMS data, and more.
This is why the simplicity of HTML and CSS now feels like a radical act. To build a website with just these tools is a small protest against platform capitalism: a way to assert sustainability, independence, longevity. “When I’m working in HTML, I feel like I understand my own line of thinking, and I’m able to make structures that support that,” web designer and artist Laurel Schwulst told me. “Not many tools let you do that.”
We don’t often think of digital design—be it websites, applications, products, or otherwise—as objects that last. They feel inherently ephemeral and fleeting. Perhaps it’s because they are built, tested, used, and discarded on screens using tools made on those same screens. A software update might render it unusable, or an uneven business plan puts the application or service out of the market.
This runs counter to the way we talk about design in other fields: We inherently want to design things to last. We admire the artifacts, the objects, the products that stand the test of time, that can be passed down from generation to generation.
The paradox of designing for the web is that the simplicity of building a website with basic tools means it can adapt to the changing technology around it. “For those of us who’ve had our websites for years, each version tells a story about us from a different era,” Schwulst says. “With my new site, the goal was to build a structure that could last for years.” This is not a nostalgia for a web long gone or a resistance to change, but a reminder for those of us working in digital spaces: Legacy is not a bad word.
I finished the updates to my website. The new biography is live, and I finally documented some recent work. I’m happy with the code. I’m going to bed at a normal time again. But online, what does “finished” really mean? I’ve been working and reworking this website for two decades, and I suspect I’ll continue to do so for the next two. The web around it might change, but I’ll retain my little corner of it, trusting that its infrastructure will always work, in some form. Simple tools, used appropriately, withstand the test of time.
