Changes to The Concuspidor

The Concuspidor & the Grand Wizard of Many Things has remained fundamentally unchanged since it was published. This is deliberate — it’s an old project (you can read more about its history) and until recently I had avoided making any changes to the way it looked.

The fact is that web-and-browser technology has changed a lot in the three decades since the Concuspidor first strode, in his pointy boots, onto the world-wide web... but some fundamentals (especially core HTML and its <p> and <img> tags) remain the same. So I’ve tightened things up without changing (or fixing?) the way the pages look.

An Informal Change-log: 1995–2025

About a decade after the launch, I washed the HTML on The Concuspidor to bring it up to date, and updated the styling on all the pages. But, other than that, I had left all the text and illustrations as they were when the project was released over a decade ago.

Up until 2025 the Concuspidor was serving HTML that was claiming to be compliant with XHTML (here’s W3 org’s DTD for “XHTML1-transitional”). If you’re a scholar of web development, you’ll know that the rise and fall of XML is an clear indicator of how expectations and practice have changed over the years.

In 2012 I added pop-up dialogues to the story. This was the first material change to the way the story has looked since it first appeared on the web...

...and in 2025 I removed them and instead made the HTML basically responsive — that is, it’s no longer hostile to mobile devices, even though of course that was never a consideration of the original project and its HTML. This also meant I could drop the (Javascript-managed) cookie that was being used to save the pop-up preferences.

In 2012, I also added the overlooked <link ref="next"...> links to the pages, which helps services like web-rocket.

2025’s HTML wash, which added one basic CSS media query, was also the first time the main images could be resized. This matters because image maps don’t resize well without JavaScript, so there’s some subtle CSS ensuring image resizing only happens if JavaScript is enabled. For this reason (just like Planetarium) The Concuspidor doesn’t require JavaScript... but without it the images won’t resize to fit your (narrow) screen. As I’m slowly weaning the Beholder site off jQuery, the recalculation of <area> co-ordinates is done with native JavaScript thanks to David Bradshaw’s image-map-resizer (this is (currently) different from the one used on Planetarium).

I also added some more <meta> tags that didn’t exist in the early days to play more nicely with social media. This is in line with the general pattern that the clunky but well-loved Beholder site build script (written in Perl, natch) tries to enforce.

Wherever the HTML used <tt> (the now-deprecated teletype tag), it has been replaced with <code>.