As it turns out, editing handcrafted semantic HTML is not that hard.
Why am I starting a weblog? Maybe the best answer is "I don't really have anything better to do", but really, why not? Having a place on the web for me to dump my random ideas sounds like a good thing and I already had this plan of setting up a personal site in my mind for a long time. Besides that, from an utilitarian perspective, I believe writing for oneself freely without a predefined goal in mind, is an use-it-or-lose-it kind of skill so I must maintain an output threshold in order to keep this tool in my language toolbox.
The reason behind me using basic, self-contained HTML + little CSS is pretty simple, they can provide a reasonable level of channel capacity while being affordable to me in terms of complexity. Let's talk about channel capacity first. One thing I learnt the hard way in the recent years is that medium, or channels are not created equally and nor are they neutral, they are all inherently biased in their own ways. As such, during the process of using them, the content creators will need to shape their message in order to make their message fit into the channel. Often subconsciously, many topics would become undiscussable during this process of shaping. As this shaping process become more and more natural to the author, those topics might eventually disappear from the author's mind, as if they never existed. To prevent this from happening, I need a place with sufficient bandwidth to dump my ideas as they come. So far, I feel like handcrafted semantic HTML has the flexibility I need. In terms of complexity, semantic HTML can also be impressively simple to write with nothing but an universal editor like vim, eliminating the need for a transpiler like markdown.pl and the end results look clean and readable even when viewed as text files.
As its name suggests, this place is intended to be raw, unpolished and filled with random ideas, but despite this weblog doesn't have a topic, there are things I will try not to cover here. For example, I will try not to put code/shell oneliner on this site, because they don't expire and can only cause confusion in the long run. (Also because they are fairly boring to write about, there is already an endless supply of those posts on the internet) But who knows. Maybe this place will evolve into something totally different than what it is intended to be, or maybe this will be the first and the last post here, let's see.