I ran across another description (prescription?) for the minimalist web today:
I like it. It seems a pretty good description of what I’m trying to achieve with twoprops.net.
I note that my site varies in two important respects:
tags
mnmlist notes “Here’s what a minimalist website should leave out…tags…”
I do have tags, but I’ve struggled with them. After reading mnmlist, I’m considering removing them. They actually take significant time to maintain, and I’m not sure there doing any good for anybody. I’ll probably plumb the logs later and see if anyone (other than bots) is actually using them.
dates
I feel, rather strongly, that a date is a vital piece of metadata for any writing. It’s frustrating to me to read almost anything and not have the context of the era in which it was written. The mnmlist article has no date information, even in the page source.
I’m not saying that writing cannot be timeless or eternal, but all writing is informed by the social and political zeitgeist of its time. The fact that some writing transcends that is amazing, miraculous, and a testimony to some fabulous writers. Most writing, though — especially tech-adjacent writing — benefits from being considered within its epoch.
I checked with the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and found a capture of the mnmlist post from December 2012. So the post is at least eleven years old — long before a lot of the pervasive cruft that infects web properties these days was nearly so bad. Clearly, mnmlist’s pleas went unheard by the commercial web! When mnmlist argued for lower “page weight” (the amount of network activity that loading a page requires) for example, they would have been anguished to learn that the “heavy” pages of their day would be considered lightweight by today’s standards.
With or without tags, I’ll continue twoprops.net in a minimal style… but including publication dates.
—2p