2020-12-31

Building a 50-Year Website

What would it mean to build a website that would last 50 years?

Every page should stand alone:

• no libraries
• no shared styles
• no shared code
• duplicate everything
• static everything

Each page should essentially be an archive, a folder with an index.html file.

This is the opposite of building a maintainable site. We don't want a 50-year site to be maintainable, we want it to maintenance-free.

You could build the site with just markdown files, and use a static site generator to build it up, but that's a thing that can break. Yeah, you could rebuild a new site with another generator from the original markdown, but would you want to?

If everything broke one day, would you go through the effort to fix it before adding more content? Or would you give up on it?