https://nor.the-rn.info/rm_ation

https://nor.the-rn.info/rm_ation

I've had an ethical conundrum with this website for roughly fifteen years. I always want the site to be JavaScript-free, accessible, and static. I believe that stability is fundamentally inseparable from having your work successfully experienced and archived. But I am a web engineer by trade and desire an SPA laboratory. The best solution I came up with was compiling both during the build and essentially putting the static site within <noscript> tags.

That's what they're for right?

Well... sorta.

This is where the ethical conundrum part comes into play: I want users to natively experience my website in harmony with their preference's already set and their preferred way of interaction with said preferences. Examples include: device choice, operating system settings, browser selection, and accessibility configuration.

If you've ever had to tell someone how (and - lord help you - why) to clear their cookies you understand where I am coming from.

If I implemented the site with <noscript> tags, the only way to get to the Scriptless Incarnation would be disabling JavaScript in your browser. This isn't something commonly practiced, unless you already practice it. I believe it is rude to offload that responsibility to my visitors. If they want to get to the Scriptless Incarnation, they ought be able to just as easily as the Scripted, just as if they were browsing any other website.

But I wanted both. And I wanted both to be canon!

Of course, every time I tried to solve the problem the Scriptless Incarnation always came out on top. Accessibility is more important than tomfoolery. Full stop.

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This afternoon I went for a walk, shot the above photo, and had a realization. If one were to bravely dig through the primordial (now locally archived) git history of this very website, they might notice traces of a long since collapsed zone: /rm_ation. Yes, the initial vision of this domain name was https://nor.the-rn.info/rm_ation. I ran into too many technical issues to get that working how I needed. This was circa 2009.

What if the Scripted Incarnation lived at https://nor.the-rn.info/rm_ation?

When I got home, the new pressing of Burial's Untrue was waiting at my door. Untrue was on heavy rotation during the founding days of this site. It was a beautiful synchronicity. I put on the record. Wrote this blog. And finally launched the Scripted Incarnation.