About

How a page gets here

Sources are collected first and kept as received. Each one is summarised, then researched into a working record that states where every piece of information came from — title, author, publisher, link, when it was published and when it was fetched. Only then is a page written, and it may not carry a claim that record does not support. The working record stays in version control, so how a conclusion was reached remains inspectable long after the page is published.

Articles and topics

An article covers a specific item or event. It is dated and it is not rewritten as its subject develops — a later development is a new article. A topic is the standing summary of a subject and is revised as understanding improves. There are 58 articles and 1 topic page.

Four languages, always

The site is written in British English, Taiwan Mandarin, the Spanish of Spain and Malaysian Malay, and every page carries all four. Each is a specific variety rather than a language in general: British spelling and not American, 繁體 as written in Taiwan and not the mainland, Peninsular Spanish and not Latin American, Malaysian Malay and not Indonesian. Each language is its own page at its own address rather than a switch inside one page, so any version can be linked, bookmarked and read on its own — and so none is printed on top of another. The control in the top bar moves between them.

How it is built

These are plain HTML files. Every page renders completely with JavaScript switched off — the words, the navigation and the icons are all in the file itself. Search is the single exception, because a static site has no server to answer a query; the page says so, and the tags and articles indexes cover the same ground by browsing. Nothing is loaded from anywhere else: no fonts from a font host, no scripts from a content network, no analytics, no tracking of any kind. What the site ships and what it borrows is accounted for on the licences page.