BAREBONES
2024. A web art piece centered around the premise of an anti-social, self-destructive website.
When I initially began learning to make websites as a middle schooler, websites were pretty much only made with HTML, CSS, JS, and some libraries on the side. As a beginner, being able to simply open the browser devtools and poke around in the website source code of even the largest companies was integral to my development as a budding programmer. What I saw was — more or less — what the original web developer saw.
But then came the introduction of libraries, frameworks, transpilers — React, Angular, Typescript, Vite, JSX, Babel, etc. — which sought to address the shortcomings of existing web standards and frontend practices. As a side effect, however, websites slowly became these bloated cross-platform behemoths, held together by... Javascript? No longer was I able to just open the devtools and poke around; what I saw was machine-generated and regenerated to the point of illegibility.
barebones sprouted from the various conflicting feelings I have towards the state of modern web development. It is a website that ceaselessly destroys and regenerates itself, looping between activity and reactivity. It is a website that openly wears its "bones" on its "body," yet is still woefully incomprehensible. One viewer of the website described it as "anti-social;" another called it an "eldritch abomination."
barebones is built with Sveltekit + UnoCSS. In many ways, the behavior of the website is heavily reliant on Sveltekit's compilation, reactivity, and component features. Displaying of the "bones" (code annotations) was achieved with hacky combinations of CSS pseudo-elements, JS fetches, and some Svelte glue. Although I took measures to optimize performance/caching/loading times, the sheer amount of dynamic data rendering and re-rendering may potentially make the website difficult to view on anything less performant than a laptop/desktop.