Now compatible with light web browsers

After reading an article on Drews blog about visurf which is based on Netsurf and his encouragement to make more sites compatible with this light browser I decided to take a look at my little blog and found the horrible state it was in.

By looking at my blog from the perspective of the modern web it looked minimal and nice, but on the inside the theme I decided to base my blog on was using pretty modern styles a features which I had to get rid of.

The first thing I noticed was that my color scheme was not respected and I thought (mistakenly) that Netsurf is not being able to even color the background. But in the closer look my styles were using at some parts modern CSS3 (I guess) variables to set theme colors.
Netsurf does not know such a thing for style. My solution was simple, to move the color scheme style generation to the server side and thus I rewritten it to use SASL which provides same features regarding my use of variables as the previous modern solution.

AT this point I called it done and stopped working on it, since it looked kind of usable. But who would have thought it would stay in my head and thus I had gone on another journey of backward web development.

The other big point was to get rid of modern CSS options and replace them with older and supported ones and also while at it make it look much nicer in w3m since it is nice terminal “web browser”. There was only one feature used from modern CSS and that was display: flex; and its other options which are unsupported but makes it really easy to make webpage look nice with whatever elements. I somehow managed to replace most of the flex elements part with either float: left/right; and by NOT using div for everything but instead instead using span or removing it and reworking the part to look the same. I still kept the flex display option for the mobile view since it makes it just so easier for me to make (otherwise I would not even bother with mobile view, who is even using such evil devices to vie my blog anyway?).

These changes make it look almost same in modern web browsers and Netsurf also caught with them (round corners are not supported at the moment). The bonus of reworking it and getting rid of many divs is that menu and links, tags are now on the same line in w3m, while before each link, tag was on its separate line. This makes it look better in my eyes.

I also played with my video template and the alternative text is now nicely formatted and it even displays the file size of the video.

All in all it is a change which only few will ever notice (since I believe there is nobody apart from me who reads this blog.