So because I gotta remember that all the people who see what I do only see about 10% of it each, let's start off with some news: this evening, we started streaming Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves! Given that I was able to get through the first two, it felt wrong not to finish off the trilogy, and now that I have consistent days off from work, here we are! It wasn't as exciting or high energy as I would've liked, I was a little out of it, folks were a little sleepy, but that's okay, they get like that and we made it through. Fridays at 6PM EST! Watch out if you wanna catch me live!

Now onto a bit of pondering. If you don't know, way back in the Neocities days, I had looked out onto the world of Web development documentation in despair. It felt like you had two, neither especially satisfactory approaches to beginner documentation, references and tutorials. References are great if you know what you're looking for, but they're not very good teaching tools. Tutorials are good at teaching people, but they either focused too much on "do this to make this happen", which is simple but doesn't give you much context, or just weren't very good in the first place (see: old W3Schools, or GeeksForGeeks, which asks me to do the needful and give Indians my Google account just to scroll through one of their pages, and no thanks).

I thought I could do better and came up with Tesserae. Tesserae was meant to teach people concepts, stuff that would explain why Web pages are built and work like they do, arranged into courses by complexity and topic. A tutorial can give you a valid HTML page to start with, or can explain how to set margins on an element, but I wanted to put concepts like block vs. inline elements, page flow, page structure, and the box model in people's heads. These are the glue (the why) around all the real physical pieces of attributes and elements and CSS declarations that you'd actually implement on your site (the what), and it's what makes using them effectively make sense. My initial version of this from late 2018 got decently far, but I decided it didn't look particularly great and wasn't 100% accurate, so I started over with a layout I built using mini.css.

While Tesserae hasn't gotten an update since May 2022, and before then November 2020, I've always had bigger plans for it, including branching out into JavaScript and PHP and adapting Alexi (star of nofi) to be its mascot. It's never been too terribly popular, which is a contributing factor to me not doing much with it in a while, but the people who appreciate it (like Savannah) definitely seem to appreciate it, and I feel like I'm a good technical writer with an ear for clear, concise explanations. It felt like a good "eventual" project.

Fast forward to me browsing Reddit this morning. I found this post on r/neocities recommending a site called The Odin Project. This is an open-source Web application development site organized by courses, starting with foundations like choosing a text editor and setting up Git repositories for site backup and versioning onto HTML basics, lists, links and images, onto block vs. inline elements, the box model, and even a nice section on flex. I had a read of some of the material, and it's very well written and very well organized and goes into a lot more detail than Tesserae does—and they have the benefit of it being open source and people being able to fix bad or outdated information. Even for folks not building Web applications, the foundations course would be a very good resource for getting started building sites from absolute zero, which was also Tesserae's starting point. There's even "further reading" sections after each topic, just like Tesserae.

So now I'm conflicted, and I don't really have a good answer here. I've found a site that's effectively doing what I wanted to do with Tesserae, but over a whole community with folks ready and willing to spend all their free time maintaining it. Even if I wanted to go forth working on it, I'd have to start devoting a few hours of my day (which is effectively an entire block of my free time either before or after work) to writing and structuring and decorating pages, when there's other sites that do this same thing with a similar level of accuracy, more detail, and with a much bigger reach.

It might be time to retire Tesserae as an idea. I'm not doing it just yet in case anyone can see some import to me having another site like that online, but man, it's six years old already and I haven't even reached content parity with tesserae_v1. Seeing as I'd like to do more Creating and less Teaching these days (with virtually no one outside Somnol I'm interested in teaching anyway), it'd be a lot of time spent on something that is absolutely cool and I'd be happy with in the end, but something I'm just not sure is worth the time investment at this point in my life. I could reorient Tesserae to be a guide to building sites for retro Web browsers like I like doing, but that's a big, messy, even more technical world that has an even smaller audience.

Thoughts, anyone? Email me if you've got an opinion one way or another.