2020-07-29-Content-vs-Presentation

Content vs. Presentation

Flying thru Geminispace this morning, I read a little post by Cos over at A Pint and a Parma, reminiscing about the old days of the internet when they hosted a site for friends. This part right here "hit different," as the kids say nowadays:

> It's so easy to get caught up in the process nowadays, futzing about with a CMS or a static site generator until things feel /just right/. What if we focussed on the content, and let it stand on its own? That's what I'm enjoying about Gemini.

~ Cos

I was going to write a post for this #100daystooffload (can we change the name? I keep thinking it's #100daysofsolitude) thing about why everyone should write their own CMS/SSG. I still probably will -- I think it's a great way to really take ownership of what you publish online -- but I know the pitfall quoted above all too well. I've used multiple SSGs with acdw.net:

Jekyll

Pandoc and a Makefile (TM)

Hakyll

'unk', a franken bash thing of my own devising

With every one, I futzed and futzed, trying to implement this idea or that idea, none of which "fit" with the authors' assumptions about what blogs look like. I've changed CSS, templates, and all, over and over, just to find something that looks "just right."

Similarly, I've gone through about a dozen Linux distros, from Crunchbang to Ubuntu to Arch to Void to Gentoo to Debian to Fedora back to Ubuntu to Manjaro back to Void. That might not be the right order. Within each distro I danced between WMs, from dwm to awesomewm to i3 to Gnome to KDE to Mate to FVWM to Openbox to wmutils ... more than I care to fully remember. Every time, it was an obsession with *form* over *function*, with *presentation* over *content*.

I'm thinking, too, of the recent discussion with left_adjoint about LaTeX, CSS, et al:

> I do agree with the CSS argument though -- one of the best things of the Web is the separation between content and presentation; it'd be really cool to be able to have like, a user stylesheet for PDFs generated by LaTeX, or to be able to drop in other styles to match the whims of the moment ...

~ me

So the good thing about CSS is that you can separate content from presentation -- you can write and publish as seperate processes, versus LaTeX or (worse) Office software -- I've spent so much time futzing around with the way my resume looks, etc., it's ridiculous -- but you can still spend a lot of time futzing.

I'm making a big deal of this because, for me, all that futzing is ultimately a distraction -- from the real work of writing, or of using my computer to do things, or whatever. I think to myself, "if I can just do this *one* thing and make it right, I can *really* get work done!", knowing full well that I can get by without it being perfect -- but it's easier to futz around with presentation than to really get started on whatever I need to be doing.

Of course, it's not all bad -- I've learned a lot about C programming by messing with dwm, and I got into what little Haskell I know by messing with Xmonad. But sometimes, I need to get work done. Or I need to write. Gemini is *really* good for just getting out of the way -- like Cos said, the content can stand on its own.

(But the futzing can still happen on Gemini! I've been putting off a missive about trying Emacs for the third/fourth time because I want to make an ASCII art of the "Always has been" astronaut meme. I literally haven't even written any of the article because of that art. I'm basically Doug Funny, with "Silt is...", or Spongebob with his fancy "The".)

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Copyright (c) 2019-2020 Case Duckworth. CC-BY-SA.

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