---
title: "Everything Old Is New Again"
date: "2026-03-18T23:24:13+00:00"
url: "https://invis.net/everything-old-is-new-again/"
author: "invisnet"
license: "CC BY-ND 4.0"
license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/"
site: "invis.net"
copyright: "Copyright 2024-2026 Charles Lecklider. All rights reserved."
disclaimer: "Personal website. Opinions are my own."
categories:
  - "Blog"
tags:
---

# Everything Old Is New Again

*TL;DR: All the cool kids have rediscovered the TUI. I'm empirically uncool, so I did too.*

---

I remember the moment I first saw the web. A friend at university showed me this new thing, explained that you could publish your own pages, that anyone could read them. My first question was how you changed how it looked. He said you couldn't. I said it wouldn't go anywhere until you could.

I was right, but then we went too far, and now we're coming back.

Today, the cool kids have rediscovered the TUI. The terminal is back because everything else is Electron now. When your text editor is secretly a web browser, eats 2GB of RAM to start, and takes thirty seconds to open a plain text file, the terminal stops looking like a step backwards. Some have gone all in — `pre` tags, box-drawing characters, the full ASCII aesthetic; looks great, but it's deeply impractical.

What you're looking at is essentially a table layout. 1997 called; it wants its design back. No, really: in 1997 we *wanted* this and couldn't have it. The layout required semantic crimes and ungodly cross-browser hacks. The fonts were whatever the visitor happened to have installed. "Responsive" meant the page loaded before your coffee got cold.

This is not nostalgia. I'd like the prices back, but you can keep the rest.

CSS Grid is what sanity looks like. This site is what a competent 1997 developer would have built, but underneath it's everything we wanted and couldn't have: proper semantic HTML, accessibility that doesn't require workarounds, cross-browser layout, cross-*device* layout, and fonts served from my own server. We'd have sacrificed a Tamagotchi for that — slowly melted on a 10K Cheetah, full termination.

The design wasn't wrong — the tools were inadequate. I just haven't worked out where to put the Braille spinner yet.

Markdown is the same story. HTML became XHTML and everything got painfully pedantic. XML became de rigueur, and the fashionistas viciously inflicted it on anything that sat still too long. Markdown became the answer for ordinary content: simple to write, simple to store, and easy to turn into whatever the future demanded. No one expected that future to be AI.

Obviously you'll be *stunned* to learn that this post is stored as markdown and that the content can be negotiated.

I can't be bothered to write a privacy policy so there's no third-party anything. No tracking, because I refuse to jump through GDPR-shaped hoops - I will be damned if this site has a cookie banner.

And absolutely no JavaScript. JavaScript has never once been necessary to deliver information — only presentation and malware, sorry, *advertisements*. I'll come back to that another time, at length, possibly with diagrams.

This is my personal site; you're allowed to have fun with your own site, so I have. Thirty years of progress, and we ended up right back where we started — only now the tools are good enough to be here on purpose.

Everything old is new again. Except the prices.


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Copyright 2024-2026 Charles Lecklider. All rights reserved.
Personal website. Opinions are my own.