2026-07-27 08:37 3.1K
The page everybody ran away from
This started with a shop that sells brutalist WordPress themes. Windows 95 chrome, CRT scanlines, System 6 windows. They are well made and I enjoyed them, and then I opened the network tab.
Behind the grey dialog boxes: PHP, a few dozen database queries, jQuery, an emoji detection script, the block library stylesheet, oEmbed discovery. Brutalism in architecture is supposed to be about being honest with your materials. This was a costume worn over heavy machinery.
The obvious rebuttal is that exposed concrete was never primitive either. Beton brut demands more precision than a finished surface, not less: the formwork has to be perfect because nothing will cover the mistakes. Looking rough is expensive. So the costume argument does not really land.
But it stayed with me, because a few sites on those same galleries were not costumes. Text-Only NPR. Low-Tech Magazine, running off a solar panel. Those pages are not styled to look thin. They are thin. Thought and implementation agree.
The page everybody ran away from
I went looking for prior art and found plenty of it, all pointing the same direction. Apaxy, h5ai, PrettyIndex, IndexOf Enhanced, and twenty years of tutorials on dropping a HEADER.html into a directory to make the listing presentable. Every single one exists to make Apache’s index page look like something else.
Nobody had gone the other way. That page has been sitting there since 1995, unchanged, still emitting an HTML 3.2 doctype in 2026, and the entire industry’s relationship with it has been embarrassment.
So: run toward it. And do it without the costume.
What that meant in practice
The default WordPress theme sends about 76 KB of HTML for a front page. A minimal theme with one template and no assets still sent 20 KB, almost none of it mine. This one sends 8.8 KB in two requests, with no JavaScript, no web fonts and no image files.
Working out where those bytes went turned out to be the actual engineering, and it is written up separately. The short version is that most of a small theme is not the theme.
The constraint that kept the work honest came from somewhere else entirely. COBOL declares the width of a field before anything is written into it, and mod_autoindex does the same thing with NameWidth. Japanese phones in the i-mode era capped a page at 10 KB and every byte was billed to the reader. Fixed widths, declared in advance, and a hard ceiling you are not allowed to cross. That is a good way to build something.
The part I did not expect
Traced closely enough, the thing stopped being interesting. It was accurate and it was dead. Adding a navigation bar would have fixed the usability and killed the point.
The way out was already in the manual. HeaderName and ReadmeName have been in mod_autoindex all along, letting a directory drop arbitrary HTML above and below its listing. It is how FTP mirrors had personality in the nineties. Nothing had to be invented, only read carefully.
That is the whole idea, really. The page you are looking at is not a nostalgia filter over a modern site. It is what is left when nothing is added.