I spent a lot of time lately making the website more efficient and a little more accessible to older browsers.

The biggest obvious change is that all non-vector images should now be .webp. I know that means I’m technically leaving some really old browsers behind, and I’m aware that .webp support isn't universal if you go far enough back. But this is one of those tradeoffs where I think it's obvious that the benefits for every subsequent generation of devices outweigh the cost of supporting hardware that old. My goal is to make this website accessible on something around a midrange device from 2015, which feels like a reasonable baseline to aim for without compromising efficiency and aesthetic value new hardware can provide.

Although whether I’ve actually achieved that is another question. I don't have a collection of phones from 2015 sitting around to test this with, so a lot of this is me guessing. If you happen to test the website on an older phone, tablet, or computer and something breaks, please email me about it! Bugs, suggestions, weird rendering issues, anything. It would be genuinely useful.

I also added a bunch of smaller compatibility things while I was going through everything, I've mentioned them in the changelog. I'll add a search index sooner or later, but it's not needed for site this small, it's good to have it before.

Maths is one area where I will get the best upgrade but putting KaTeX or MathJax natively on this webpage might be some work until I find a tutorial, either since they will get prerendered anyway. I do not want to use MathML since that won't be compatible at all with older devices + I don't like it. Rn I'm using an SVG image pipeline for mathematical expressions. It works, but eventually I'd really like to learn how to implement a native solution instead. That should be a pretty significant efficiency improvement in the long run, especially if I end up writing more posts or essays that contain a lot of mathematics.

And yes, I know some of the JavaScript here is purely aesthetic. There's very little of it anyway, though, and if something tiny like the reading progression bar above my essays helps even one person stay patient enough to finish reading, then I think it's worth keeping.