(2021-03-30) Hoyt The Small Web Is Beautiful

Ben Hoyt: The small web is beautiful. Fifteen years ago, I read E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful.

I think it’s time for a version of that book about technology, with a chapter on web development: The Small Web is Beautiful: A Study of Web Development as if People Mattered

There are two aspects of this: first, small teams and companies.... What I’m going to focus on in this essay is small websites and architectures.

I’m not the first to talk about the “small web”

• Rediscovering the Small Web by Parimal Satyal
• What is the Small Web?, by Aral Balkan

Why aim small

Fewer moving parts. It’s easier to create more robust systems

Small software is faster

Reduced power consumption

The light, frugal aesthetic

If we’re going to talk about a small web, we need to start with small software.

How do you create small programs? I think the main thing is that you have to care about size

Niklaus Wirth of Pascal fame wrote a famous paper in 1995 called A Plea for Lean Software... He goes on to describe Oberon, a computer language (which reminds me of Go in several ways) and an operating system that he believes helps solve the complexity problem

Small websites

However, it’s not just about raw size, but about an “ethos of small”. It’s caring about the users of your site: that your pages download fast, are easy to read, have interesting content, and don’t load scads of JavaScript for Google or Facebook’s trackers.

IndieWeb.org is a great resource here, though they use the term “indie” rather than “small”.

Emphasize server-side, not JavaScript

You don’t need a “framework” to develop this way, of course, but there are some tools that make this style of server-side development easier. Turbolinks from the Basecamp folks was an early one, and it’s now been superseded by Turbo, which is apparently used to power their email service Hey.

Small architectures (not microservices)

small architectures are great for developers. A small, simple codebase is easy to maintain