Why we built Open Labs with plain HTML and CSS
Our day-to-day tools are Flutter and Python, so you might expect our own website to be built with them. It isn't, and that was a deliberate choice.
The right tool for the job
Flutter is brilliant for apps, but a website that wants to be found on search engines has different needs. Crawlers love simple, semantic HTML that is there the moment the page loads.
Pick the tool that fits the problem, not the one you know best.
What we get
- Speed: no framework to download.
- SEO: real headings, links and text for crawlers.
- Longevity: a static page will still work in ten years.
The trade-off is no live search or filtering, which is fine for a lab notebook. More experiments coming soon.