Make Your Own Website: The Plain-HTML Stack That Still Opens in 2070
A hands-on PAZ tutorial: build a website from one hand-written index.html with VSCodium — the durable, vendor-free stack that still opens decades from now.
Shannon Kay wrote a beginner’s web guide for her 12-year-old daughter, who then built her class project at school without help. It is the most quietly subversive engineering document I have read this year. No framework. No build step. No npm install that breaks in eighteen months. Just index.html, a text editor, and the markup language that has refused to die since 1993.
←TODAY: In 2026 a hand-written HTML file opens in every browser on earth, no toolchain required. →3012: The pages built this way are the only ones a 25-year-old will still be able to open without an emulator. Fulcrum: The simplest stack is also the most durable — longevity is a design decision you make at file-creation time.
Here is the thing nobody tells the bootcamp cohort: HTML is, per the WHATWG, a Living Standard — there is no “HTML 6” that obsoletes your file. As Wikipedia’s HTML article notes, the format has been evolving continuously since its 1993 release while staying backward-compatible. freeCodeCamp calls it “one of the most basic building blocks of every website.” Basic is the feature. The render meets the bricklayer, and the bricklayer always wins.
The Tool: The protagonist here is VSCodium — the fully open-source, telemetry-free build of VS Code, recommended directly in Kay’s guide alongside plain editors. It is worth a computational designer’s afternoon because it is the same editor you already use for GHPython and Bonsai scripts, with zero licensing strings. Pair it with the browser you already have, and that is the entire stack. No Webpack, no vendor.
Setup:
mkdir -p ~/Websites/cats && cd ~/Websites/cats
# VSCodium (macOS/Homebrew shown; Windows/Linux on vscodium.com)
brew install --cask vscodium
codium . # opens this folder in the editor
# create a file named index.html, paste the skeleton, then:
python3 -m http.server 8000 # visit http://localhost:8000
First steps:
- In VSCodium, create
index.html. The name matters: as Kay explains,indexis the default page a browser serves for a folder’s root — same convention your Speckle viewer and Caddy server already obey. - Paste the skeleton:
<!DOCTYPE html>, then<html>wrapping a<head>(with<meta charset="UTF-8">, the viewport meta, and a<title>) and a<body>. - Inside
<body>, use the semantic tags w3schools drills in its HTML tutorial:<header><h1>, then<main>with<section>blocks, then a<footer>. Add one<a href="about.html">link — the anchor that makes it a web. - Run the server command above and refresh. You now have a website. Total dependencies: zero.
Atelier: A Swiss practice does not need this for a marketing site — it needs it for the project handover page that must still render in 2050 when the client’s facilities team opens it. A single static index.html linking the IFC export, the BEP PDF, and a photo set outlives every proprietary project-portal subscription. We teach this at PAZ as the floor under the Archicad–Speckle–Bonsai stack: the deliverable of last resort is always flat, readable text.
Hack: This Hack teaches you to preview your site exactly as a browser will serve it — catching broken relative links before a colleague does. The medium is a Workflow move: Python’s built-in server, no install. Run it from your site folder.
# from the folder containing index.html
python3 -m http.server 8000
# then open http://localhost:8000 — links resolve like production
# Ctrl+C to stop. No node_modules, no config, no vendor.
The trade-off, stated plainly: hand-written HTML scales badly past a few dozen pages — that is when a static-site generator earns its keep. But start here, because you cannot debug what you do not understand, and a generator just writes the HTML you should already be able to read.
The buildings that aged worst in my time were not the ugly ones; they were the ones nobody could open because the format went dark. Pick this quarter’s tools by one question: when the vendor disappears, can a 25-year-old still open the file? A plain index.html answers yes. Today’s concrete action: make one folder, one index.html, serve it locally, and feel how little you actually needed.
Learn-it:
- The guide: Shannon Kay — Make Your Own Website: A beginner’s guide
- Reference docs: w3schools HTML Tutorial
- What it is: freeCodeCamp — What is HTML
- Root concept: HTML — Wikipedia
- PAZ note: the static
index.htmlis the durability floor under our Archicad–Speckle–Bonsai handover workflow — the deliverable that survives every vendor.
Source: HN Learn
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