Minimalism and the "clean HTML"
My dream was to have a minimalist blog. I had many ideas in my head, I had seen many similar projects. Truly ascetic visual solutions. Each one was different. Each one had fewer elements, yet was so different from what could be described as ‘clean HTML’. It was ‘clean HTML’ that always seemed to me to be the purest form of internet minimalism. A form that has absolutely nothing in it. It's completely bare.
On the other hand, I didn't want my blog to look like that. I didn't want it to be bare. However, I wanted it to have some kind of design, but to an absolute minimum.
But what does that actually mean? I couldn't define it.
And this question has been coming back to me for many years. It came back when I wasn't blogging. It comes back when I blog.
But now, as I run a blog and constantly tinker with CSS, I'm starting to see what changes satisfy me. It's mainly removing elements.
So, you could say I had a project that contained various things, and my work – in pursuit of my version of minimalism – consists of periodically getting rid of something and checking how the blog looks without it.
That's how the menu disappeared. That's why I removed the photo of the manuscript that was on the home page. That's how I came to the conclusion that a certain form of minimalism would be to reduce the size of the headings so that they would be closer in size to the text.
Just text. Plain text. Practically nothing else. The only extravagance that deviates from this rule are the gradient lines separating individual post titles. For now, I don't want to part with them. I think they add charm to the whole and break the pattern a little.
But do I know my definition of minimalism? No. Will I ever know it? I don't know. And I care less and less about it. Now I am satisfied that I have found the direction that leads to it. It's subtracting elements from the whole.
I wonder if this path will ever lead me to ‘clean HTML’.