Design Graveyard

Hovercards being underlined

Breadcrumbs

On previous iterations of this site's design, I used breadcrumbs (Something that tells you where you're nested on the page. For example, right now you're inside the Design Graveyard page, which is part of the About this Website page, which is also part of the Meta page. So, the breadcrumb widget would display something like "Meta >> About this Website! >> Design Graveyard").

The primary reason I removed it was because it cluttered up the navigation UI without really adding anything of value (the existing navigation element of just having four links to the four big sections and then quickly clicking through to the page you want is fine enough for me) whilst redesigning the header part of every page. The primary reason why I even added it in the first place was because freckleskies' site used it as well and thought that it might be a neat and useful addition.

• Aside: I read an article called "Strong Opinions on URL Design" once and it said that good URLs can also serve as breadcrumbs, which is a connection I havent drawn before
• Back when I was still unsure if I should truly remove the breadcrumbs element, I had the idea of making it only visible when hovering over the navigation section; the idea being to hide visual clutter you don't need (this idea was inspired by the Focus something theme on Obsidian that also hides most UI elements until you hover over them, leading to a cleaner UI).
  • As there is no such thing as "hovering over something" on mobile, it would've always been visible on it.

2026-04-26: Through pure happenstance, I accidentally discovered that the supertitle for pages (e.g. the "Notes on..." above the "Threatmixer" in my "Notes on Threatmixer" page, which I purely implemented for style and flow at first) is actually very well suited to also provide a link back to the upper section, essentially replacing the breadcrumbs with something more subtle and not out-of-place! Neat!

Custom context menu items

The context menu is the menu that appears when you right-click things. I first had the idea to add custom items to it when I wanted to give every image on my site that was not made by me a menu item that would take you to the page I took the image from. Whilst I could just make the image link directly to the source, it would be awkward for purely decorative graphics to link to random resource pages as well as straight up impossible to do for graphics that already link to other pages (such as how a Wikipedia button that is meant to link to Wikipedia also has an inherent link to the artist that drew it).

Interestingly enough, there was in fact some progress made on an official implementation via a <menu> element, but it was given up on since browsers lacked interest in implementing it. The only alternative method I found is replacing the right-click context menu and implementing my own via JavaScript (very horrible) or adding in my own UI buttons that get drawn around the cursor when one right-clicks.

There's also the ability for browser plugins to add their own context menu items, but maintaining a browser add-on per each website you frequent for something so small is really convoluted. Perhaps a "library add-on" that adds that functionality where pages could register their own context menu items via a JavaScript API would be a somewhat acceptable workaround..?

Regardless, every option is too much effort for something really minor. I still love the idea though.

Multiple Themes

I once had the fun idea of implementing different site themes that you could switch between on an settings page. Though as I worked towards implementing it, I felt this gnwaing dissatisfaction on how implementing it would limit me:

• Page-specific styling and customization would suffer immensely if I were to add multiple themes. For example, I've always dreamed that each standard page would have it's own icon, accent color, background pattern, color schemes and other tweaks. Having multiple themes means ensuring every page-specific styling works with every theme-specific styling, which is just a clusterfuck of edge cases to despair to whilst trying to maintain it.
• Just writing the JavaScript to implement multiple themes in the way I want to is hell.
• The itch to do pretty webpages and experiment with styling is already resolved by pages such as Page Art, Terminal, Teeny Towers or Notes on UFO 50. There's no need to potentially disturb and break the stable core functionality of standard pages. I can just spin up isolated pages for fun whenever I want!

Having just one theme makes me focus on really polishing it up as well as making it easier to implement seasonal styling (e.g. fun little tweaks for christmas or halloween and such).