ABOUT THIS WEBSITE
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An explanation for why Dylan chose what he did for this site.
This is not your run-of-the-mill website. It is not generated from something
like Markdown, nor is it written in HTML. Each page is simply a .txt file which
is inserted into <pre> tags that reside in a tiny template.
The template contains the CSS, favicon, sidebar and the few HTML elements needed
to house the content. Each resulting HTML file is fully self-contained.
Everything listed above is embedded into each file.
Thanks to this "static" model, each page on this website takes up a single HTTP
request. One can simply use curl to grab a page and it'll render in the browser
offline and as intended.
This remains quick despite the loss in caching as each page is no larger than
3-10 kilobytes. See: https://tools.pingdom.com/#5ca38087eb000000
[1.0] Index
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- Favicon [2.0]
- Why provide a favicon at all? [2.1]
- References [3.0]
[2.0] Favicon
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The favicon is a base64 encoded gif file which was handmade in GRAFX2. [0]
The gif contains an indexed (and tiny) palette which contributes largely to
its small size.
Many years ago I worked creating pixel art (assets) for an MMORPG called
Graal Online [1]. Little sprites like this one are a joy to create. Here's the
favicon in full (to get an idea as to how small it is).
<link href='data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhEAAQAPH/AAAAAP8AAP8AN////yH5BAUAAAQ
ALAAAAAAQABAAAAM2SLrc/jA+QBUFM2iqA2bAMHSktwCCWJIYEIyvKLOuJt+wV69ry5cfwu7WCVp2RSP
oUpE4n4sEADs=' rel=icon>
Something of this size is negligible compared to the rest of the page. Hell, if
I continue to ramble on, this paragraph will surpass it in size.
[2.1] Why provide a favicon at all?
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The funny thing about web browsers is that they'll assume a favicon exists
despite this possibly being false. Browsers will try to load it and you'll
end up with 404 and a wasted request.
Providing some kind of inline favicon is the only way to quiet the browser
and prevent it from trying to load something non-existent. Prior to creating
the above favicon, this website used the following snippet.
<link href=data:, rel=icon>
Through a lot of tinkering I found that this is the smallest possible
(inline) favicon. This successfully shushes the web request in all tested
browsers.
[3.0] References
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[0] http://grafx2.chez.com/
[1] https://graalonline.com/
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This site is an archive of a previous version of KISS's website. The current
version can be found at https://kisslinux.org/.
Dylan Araps (C) 2019-2020
kiss-community (C) 2020-2021
Dilyn Corner (C) 2021
Linux(R) is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and
other countries.