Developer Creates a One-Line Website

The self-proclaimed “minimalist and perfectionist” Sime Ramov has developed his own technique for publishing incredibly stripped-down web pages. View source on his blog, and you’ll see what we mean. In Sime’s words: There should only be one request when you hit any page. So page views equals hits. This is because CSS is inlined, and […]

The self-proclaimed "minimalist and perfectionist" Sime Ramov has developed his own technique for publishing incredibly stripped-down web pages.

View source on his blog, and you'll see what we mean.

In Sime's words:

There should only be one request when you hit any page. So page views equals hits. This is because CSS is inlined, and data URIs are used for images. If you look at the source of this page, you will notice everything is on one line, i.e. minimized. CSS and HTML are minimized separately and then inlined.

That wasn't enough for me so unused CSS selectors are removed on a page-by-page basis. This means each page uses just those CSS elements and declarations which are actually present on any given page.

He writes everything in Markdown and uses Pandoc to incorporate templates. He also admits that he "stole" the majority of his ideas from Mark Pilgrim's scripts. No worries -- the web is built on so-called "stolen" code, and he did the right thing by telling us where he got it.

There's a debate about whether his method is actually more or less efficient going on at Hacker News.

NB: Yes, I realize I'm using the incorrect character to write Sime's name, but the Croatian graphemes aren't rendering properly in our WordPress installation for some reason. I have the Wired hamsters on it.

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