A retronym is when you modify the established name of something because a newer version of the thing has made the old name ambiguous:
- acoustic guitar
- conventional oven
- analog watch
- whole milk
- cloth diaper
twoprops.net is what is known as a “static site” (or “static web site”). To this day, the vast majority of web sites still serve unchanging content: like a paper pamphlet or flyer, the information on the site doesn’t change. Yes, there’s the occasional (often horrific) form to fill out and Submit, but most of the web simply offers up information. Yet the sites themselves aren’t “static” in that the modern web is overwhelmed with content delivery systems and dynamic page generating systems rife with Javascript code and massive frameworks and their dependencies (some of which create single, “static” web pages that require downloads that I suspect are larger than the entire World Wide Web of 1995) — to the extent that many simple information sites are unusable without a megabit internet connection and a blazingly fast computer.
Oh, for simpler times. [NSFW content warning.]
twoprops.net is truly a static site. The server itself just holds plain-text .html files, .png images, and a scattering of animated .gif files and .webm videos. There is no Javascript. No server-side includes. No CGI files. Even the random page link is implemented without Javascript or Perl or Python or PHP or SQL or Go or Swift or… There are a few lines of bash, but even those don’t execute in the web server or in the browser (they’re cron jobs, if you must know).
But now, actual sites without megabytes of cruft that mainly serve to get in the way of reading are so rare that they’ve earned a retronym.
Welcome to my static site.
—2p