Colophon

Hand-written HTML and a single stylesheet. No framework, no static-site generator, no build step, no JavaScript, no third-party requests. A meaningful share of the people who read this subject browse with scripting off and notice when a site does not need it.

The governing design rule: colour encodes time, not taste

Half of what is written here is 2006 and half is 2026, and a reader who confuses the two breaks a machine. So every colour on the site means something, and nothing on the site is coloured for decoration:

Gold

The record — a dated, fixed fact. The chronology rail, version numbers, the left rule on record blocks, and every link underline on the site.

Moss

Still true, still shipping. Status chips and the rows in a Standing block that hold up today.

Rust

Ended, or actively wrong now. Status chips, the top rule on every Standing block.

Nothing else uses colour: no coloured headings, no branded buttons, no badges, no gradients, no shadows, no rounded cards, no fill larger than a chip. Colour is never the only signal either — every marked block also carries its rule, its word and its date, so the system survives colour blindness, monochrome print and a screen reader.

Links are ink with a one-pixel gold underline that thickens on hover. There is no blue link text anywhere on this site. Visited links drop to the secondary ink so that somebody working through an archive can see where they have been.

Palette

Measured against the paper: ink 16.1:1, secondary ink 6.10:1, gold-ink 5.59:1, rust 6.63:1, moss 6.13:1 — all above the 4.5:1 floor for body text. Gold itself measures 3.10:1 and is therefore forbidden as text at any size; it is rules, marks and underlines only. A dark palette is defined for readers whose system asks for one, and it is held to the same floor.

Body text is never pure black on pure white. Warm bone and near-black read like a printed manual, which is the correct reference for a site that mostly reproduces the substance of documents.

Type

Body, headings

Newsreader — a variable serif with optical sizing, licensed under the SIL Open Font License. Body at 400, headings at 600, the wordmark and pull-quotes at 600 italic.

Rail, chips, labels

Departure Mono, also OFL. A pixel-grid mono, used only at 11–13px and uppercase, where it reads as a 2006 CRT without any skeuomorphic nonsense.

Code

The system monospace stack. Zero bytes over the wire.

Current state, stated honestly: the two webfonts above are the intended faces and are not yet installed. Until they are subset to Latin and served from this origin, the site falls back to the system serif and monospace stacks, which is why it may look a little different from the description above on your machine. No font will ever be loaded from a font CDN or any other third party — that is the whole reason for self-hosting, and the reason the fallback ships rather than a Google Fonts tag.

Two knobs own the layout: a measure of 64 characters and a line height of 1.7rem. Every vertical margin on the site is a multiple or a simple division of that line height; there are no arbitrary pixel values in the stylesheet except hairline widths and the fixed small sizes the mono face needs.

Layout: the chronology gutter

On screens wider than about 1000px the text column is not centred. It sits to the right of a 12-character rail, and a paragraph narrating a datable event puts a real <time> element into that rail. Reading down the rail gives you an article’s timeline before you have read a word of it. Below that width the rail collapses and the date renders inline above its paragraph.

The date is markup, not CSS-generated content. Generated content is unreliably exposed to assistive technology and cannot be selected or copied, and a chronology a screen reader cannot hear is not a chronology. The extra element is the price and it is worth paying.

The same rail carries version numbers on release-history pages, turning a table into a visible ladder, and the last-verified stamp on pages that go stale.

Weight and third parties

• Front page under 25 KB of HTML and CSS.
• Article HTML and CSS under 60 KB before the illustration; under 160 KB with it.
• Zero third-party requests on every page. No fonts from a CDN, no analytics script, no embeds, no share buttons, no cookie banner, no newsletter modal, no comment system. Open your browser’s network panel and count.
• No cookies of any kind. Details on Privacy.
• The site renders identically with JavaScript disabled, because there is none to disable.

Illustration policy

One image per article, all in one house style so the archive reads as a single publication: a two-ink riso plate — flat vector shapes in ink and gold on paper, heavy grain, visible mis-registration between the two plates, geometric and schematic. Diagrams, ladders, maps, swarms. No photography, no people, no lettering beyond bare numerals; any label longer than a numeral is typeset in the HTML caption, where it can be selected, translated and read aloud. Rust and moss never appear in an image, because they are interface inks and they mean something.

Two hard prohibitions. No fabricated screenshots — a rendered imitation of a 2006 desktop is a misrepresentation, and real ones from the archive are not ours to republish. No photorealistic hardware, which would imply there is a machine in front of us.

The mark

A single gold horizontal line that stops, gaps, and restarts thinner. A dead distribution’s last living trace is usually a torrent somebody is still seeding, and a swarm that thins but does not end is the whole thesis of the site in one figure. It carries no text and it reads at 16 pixels.

Hosting and tooling

Static files, written in a text editor, kept in version control, served through Cloudflare. Legacy paths from the 2005–2006 site are handled by a redirect file at the edge rather than by any application logic — there is no application. Nothing on this site is generated at request time, which is also why there is nothing at request time to log about you.

Accessibility

• Every text colour meets or beats 4.5:1 against its background, in both palettes.
• Colour is never the only carrier of meaning; every status also carries its word.
• Dates are real <time> elements; tables use real header cells with scopes; the skip link is the first thing in the tab order.
• The page is readable at 200% zoom and at any window width down to 320px, and it reflows rather than scrolling sideways.
• Nothing moves, animates, autoplays or appears over the text.

If something here fails you, that is a bug and it gets fixed: editor@lxnaydesign.net.