Welcome to my site!

I'm Pierce, and this is my very basic website.

Hint: darker blue is for linked text, lighter blue is for annotated text (hover over it to see more details).

My goal with this site is to minimise any and all usage of JavaScript, using as much pure HTML & CSS as possible. This first version of my site is written completely by hand, no frameworks, libraries, and of course no JavaScript, even for the mobile compatibility. A bit of a teaching moment for me, so my next site will probably use a framework (this was painful to build :}).

If you're looking for more information about me, please feel free to head straight to my About page.

What is this?

This is my personal website, the formal one, at least.
Currently it's somewhat of a playground for me to learn how browsers and websites work.
Of course, I'm aware that doing this without JS is not amazing in and of itself, the engineers behind the systems that enable this are much more incredible; nonetheless, a lot of websites nowadays are becoming JavaScript first, with little concern for those who either have JavaScript disabled or use less powerful devices, just because it's easier.

So, at least on my website, I won't force JavaScript on users, but rather make it opt-in. You don't need it, but it can make a couple sparkles here and there for you, if you let it :)

Some noJS highlights, because they took a bit of thinking:

• The page-tracking navbar
  • No JS reading the URL and annotating the HTML, it's just hard-coded into the page itself, since each page is its own document anyways (would be much easier with a framework...)
• The frozen header row
• The linked content rows
  • Linked content rows are usually done via JavaScript and often obscure the URL with "javascript:void(0)", even when it could just be a straight href
• The mobile compatibility:
  1. navbar hamburger menu
  2. rotating table, purely using CSS
  • These often use JS, serving mobile and desktop with one document. Admittedly, I've chosen to do the same here, but implementing that functionality using CSS.

Bruno Simon's site is a good counter-example: it couldn't run smoothly on a less powerful device, but perfectly fulfils its purposes of novelty, fun, and showcasing his skills; I don't think it's the most usable site, but that's easily overlooked in light of how fun it is to drive the little car around :D

That being said, I'll likely be introducing a framework in the future, to reduce codebase redundancy and provide a more feature-rich site (v2), while keeping it quite minimal, but for now, it's all hand-made. As you can surely tell.

Greetings, weary traveller, welcome to the Greenhouse. Would you like to take a moment to rest your eyes?