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                                ABOUT THE SITE

First a big thank you. The font used for this site is Go Mono and was created
by the Bigelow & Holmes[1] type foundry specifically for the Go project.
Amazingly this high quality set of fonts, produced by a type foundry, has been
made available under the same open source license as Go itself.

Sort and quick answer: WolfMUD is a text based game so a plain text website
seemed appropriate.

The much longer answer: Consider for a moment. If I added pretty background
images, fancy highlighting, custom fonts, a funky colour scheme, JavaScript
transitions and effects and then tracked your activity from here to kingdom
come would it make this text any easier to read?

On another of my sites I wrote the following:


    Text is a simple, device independent format for information.

    I find it increasingly annoying when a simple piece of information is
    hidden behind layers of CSS, JavaScript, AJAX and Flash.

    Instead of retrieving a simple page my browser has to load the HTML,
    then the CSS, the JavaScript libraries that get dragged in to do a
    tiny widget or something, then it drags in tracking code. Off it goes
    again to pull in social media widgets, again to pull in images and
    Flash — probably advertising?  Can I see the text I want to read yet?

    What could be a simple page is now full of “stuff” being pulled in
    from different sources all over the net — any of which could either be
    malicious or used as an attack vector against me — and I have a dozen
    cookies tracking me as well.  Can I read the text yet? Ah — the page
    is actually loaded with misleading SEO optimised text to lure me here
    and is totally useless — back to the search engines I go.


WolfMUD has a very small niche audience. Making it inaccessible would turn it
into a micro niche. By keeping the website text based it can be read on
practically any device that can access the internet. You don't need a fancy
browser with all the latest plugins[2]. You don't need a fast device or a fast
connection. The display you use does not even have to be in a graphics mode.

Another advantage of plain text is that I can use my choice of editor[3] to
author the content. I can also use all of my 'power tools' that process text
and simply pipe data between tools. Keeping the content in a version control
system[4] is also easy and incredibly powerful.

Inspiration for the look and feel of the site as well as navigation comes from
Gopher[5] which is very appropriate for the Go language[6] :)

If you have Lynx installed, want to be nostalgic and try gopher out then:

  lynx gopher://gopher.quux.org

--
Diddymus

  [1] Bigelow & Holmes: https://bigelowandholmes.typepad.com
      Go Blog post: https://blog.golang.org/go-fonts

  [2] Ever tried a text based web browser? I use Lynx a lot. It's very fast
      and low on resources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

  [3] I use VIM for all my text editing: https://www.vim.org

  [4] All of the site content and WolfMUD's code is kept in Git:
      https://git-scm.com/

  [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

  [6] Go language gopher mascot from the official homepage:
      https://golang.org/doc/gopher/frontpage.png


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