title:raison-d-êtreaudience: none

The <lang=“fr”>raison d’être for this website, the reason for its being, is:

why
It is my personal presence in webspace. A place where experiments are performed with http, html, css, and all the other inglorious things out there. It is a little dada. A bit situational. Somewhat subversive. And very intentional. It has been built with a little spite. Because quality. Craftsmanship. And quiet competence over noisy performance.
The web has turned into a homogenized positivity-infused SEO-driven bloated slop pile. This is the antithesis. It is fully accessible and better engineered than the garbage that some megacorps consider good. Mediocre is not tolerated.
Enjoy!
And when things break, normality will be restored as soon as possible.
If anything offends, please kindly get off the planet, immediately.
aesthetic
This website has a novel retro-skeuomorphic aesthetic resembling the output you’d find from a 1980s impact or laser printer; furthermore, information is structured and presented in a way that very much resembles the very early days of the world wide web (where <dl> was not only de rigeur but content negotiation was a thing1). If skeuomorphic design is not to your taste, the controls at the top of the page can be used to change how it looks2. Sure, there is the usual light/dark mode, and also contrast, but theme and media controls are the real power move. If you eschew any visual nonsense, this site looks great in a browser using reader mode or with disabled css. Despite appearances, this site takes accessibility seriously and conforms to WCAG 2.2 Level AA as a minimum, with Level AAA where feasible. For more information see accessibility.
navigation
This site offers the usual pages for you, dear interlocuteur, to explore; the “nav” the top is a good place to look, and perennial favorite that is meta3 is a good place to start (because it is literally the metadata for this site and the person behind it).
iff
If you identify yourself (via login) using IndieAuth or whatever, additional content may appear based on an IFF-like state. IFF is traditionally a binary decision, but there is more nuance here: think of it more of a continuum from friend-ly (harmless, mostly harmless, frenemy, etc.) to foe-ish (bad bot, bozo4) and where you fall within that continuum determines what compartmentalized things you can access.
how
This site is crafted by hand with love, lots of coffee, and has been thoughtfully and intentionally implemented as a “bespoke platform for one”5 using contemporary practice and technology. Achieving this is not as easy as it appears (because making simple is hard); the colophon details how this was done because apparently people want to know about the virtual glue and duct tape that hold it together. It is best to never ask how sausages and websites are made (answer: it involves a lot of mess that any sane person would do their best to avoid).
conneg
For those into such things, content negotiation is supported6. IYKYK.

$LastModified: 2026-05-14 14:56:15Z (Thu, 14 May 2026) $

  1. It is at this point that some people (you know who you are) will doubt the veracity of these words. Go check with TimBL if you don’t believe me. ↩︎

  2. These user preferences are persisted to local storage (not cookie storage) for your convenience. See privacy for specifics. ↩︎

  3. The meta pages are at the root of a site. The root folder in Unix starts with a “slash” character, so these pages are also known as the “slash” pages by the cognoscenti. Anybody familiar with UK or Australian slang will be giggling because “slash” means something entirely different there. ↩︎

  4. People who have their Bozo Bit set should beware that I am more than capable of holding a grudge for decades, and mea maxima culpa might not cut it. ↩︎

  5. This is misleading, in the nicest possible way, and it all depends on how you define “one”. Is it really just a folly for 1 person, or is it 1 node in network? Given that omz13 is a Real Programmer, what are the chances that this is one something for utility and agency, engineered for performance, safety, accessibility, and usability. No quiche. No JSON. gRPC FTW. ↩︎

  6. Content Negotiation (conneg) is a wonderfully versatile method that has been woefully underutilized. If you think of user agents accessing a server, it makes absolute sense. If you think of Browsers asking a server for only HTML because they are obsessed with the presentation layer instead of the document/data layer, it is clear where the blame lies. There is also a small amount of delight in knowing that using conneg gets under the skin of some online communities, and I am more than fine with that. ↩︎