the-monospace-web-pandoc/index.md

title, author, date, lang

title	author	date	lang
The Monospace Web	Oskar Wickström	August 2024	en

Introduction

Monospace fonts are dear to many of us. Some find them more readable, consistent, and beautiful, than their proportional alternatives. Maybe we're just brainwashed from spending years in terminals? Or are we hopelessly nostalgic? I'm not sure. But I like them, and that's why I started experimenting with all-monospace Web.

On this page, I use a monospace grid to align text and draw diagrams. It's generated from a simple Markdown document (using Pandoc), and the CSS and a tiny bit of Javascript renders it on the grid. The page is responsive, shrinking in character-sized steps. Standard elements should just work, at least that's the goal. It's semantic HTML, rendered as if we were back in the 70s.

The Basics

Look at this lovely horizontal break:

---

Or a plain old bulleted list:

• Banana
• Paper boat
• Cucumber
• Rocket

Trees

It's nice to visualize trees. This is a regular unordered list with a tree class:

• /dev/nvme0n1p2

  • usr
    • local
    • share
    • libexec
    • include
    • sbin
    • src
    • lib64
    • lib
    • bin
    • games
      • solitaire
      • snake
      • tic-tac-toe
    • media
  • media
  • run
  • tmp

Tables

We can use regular tables that automatically adjust to the monospace grid. They're responsive.

Name	Dimensions	Position
Boboli Obelisk	1.41m × 1.41m × 4.87m	43°45'50.78"N 11°15'3.34"E
Pyramid of Khafre	215.25m × 215.25m × 136.4m	29°58'34"N 31°07'51"E

Note that only one column is allowed to grow.

ASCII Drawings

We can draw in <pre> tags using box-drawing characters:

╭─────────────────╮
│ MONOSPACE ROCKS │
╰─────────────────╯

To have it stand out a bit more, we can wrap it in a <figure> tag, and why not also add a <figcaption>.

┌───────┐ ┌───────┐ ┌───────┐
│Actor 1│ │Actor 2│ │Actor 3│
└───┬───┘ └───┬───┘ └───┬───┘
    │         │         │    
    │         │  msg 1  │    
    │         │────────►│    
    │         │         │    
    │  msg 2  │         │    
    │────────►│         │    
┌───┴───┐ ┌───┴───┐ ┌───┴───┐
│Actor 1│ │Actor 2│ │Actor 3│
└───────┘ └───────┘ └───────┘

Example: Message passing.

Let's go wild and draw a chart!

                      Things I Have
│                                     ████ Usable

15  │
│                                     ░░░░ Broken
│
12  │             ░

│             ░

│   ░         ░

9  │   ░         ░

│   ░         ░

│   ░         ░                    ░
6  │   █         ░         ░          ░
│   █         ░         ░          ░
│   █         ░         █          ░
3  │   █         █         █          ░
│   █         █         █          ░
│   █         █         █          ░
0  └───▀─────────▀─────────▀──────────▀─────────────
Socks     Jeans     Shirts   USB Drives

Media

Media objects are supported, like images and video:

They extend to the width of the page, and add appropriate padding in the bottom to maintain the monospace grid.