alvs.dev

Code

The Philosophy

The site uses a classless stylesheet as a foundation to ensure semantic HTML looks good by default, layered with custom scoped styles only when specific structural patterns are needed.

Design Decisions: The Classless Journey

The decision to start with a classless stylesheet was about reducing the mental overhead of styling basic elements (like headings, lists, and links). It forces a focus on semantic HTML and content hierarchy.

My journey into this approach began with discovering Simple.css, not as a heavy framework, but as an introduction to the concept that a pure stylesheet can create a functional, readable site with zero classes.

However, I don’t use it exclusively. While the classless base handles the “look” of individual elements, I utilize Astro’s scoped styles to build intentional layout structures, without polluting a global stylesheet.

Why Astro?

I started as a pure HTML, CSS, and JS developer. Eventually I started looking at static site generators like Hugo, Eleventy, Gatsby, Jekyll. Too many options, and I never finished anything real with any of them. Just tutorials.

My vision for the site was still forming, and I didn’t want to commit to a stack. So I stayed skeptical.

Then I heard about Astro. No framework lock-in. The syntax read like HTML. I tried porting my own site over to get hands-on and god, did I love it.

The Evolution (Archives)

  1. The Hardcoded Start: A single-page HTML monolith.
  2. The Gulp Era (2022): Using Pug templating and Gulp for source management.
  3. The Classless Introduction: Discovering pure stylesheets (Simple.css) and adopting a minimal-first mindset.
  4. The Custom Standard (2025): Developing the current hybrid approach of classless base styles combined with custom scoped structures.

Future Roadmap

A lot of ideas, some will change along the way:

This site is going to be a real digital garden of my own by the time I reach old age, for sure.