> The rendering reminds me of typeset math from the 60s

I'd like to congratulate the author on building something like this. It obviously serves a niche, and represents an approach to that is useful.

That said, there is a trade-off to giving up beautiful math rendering. Aesthetics in math does matter for all but the roughest of jots -- even if you never show your jots to anyone.

When I was in academia, I kept my jots in a single continuous LaTeX file. I was fluent in LaTeX so I could jot down math almost faster than I could write them down on paper (keyboard + LaTeX macros + rapid copy-paste of repeated structures helped -- you wouldn't believe how much time you can save by making say "\sum_i^n\sum_j^m" a macro in index-heavy fields like mine).

I threw snippets and stuff into it, and because it was so beautiful, I would regularly review it and coalesce new ideas from it. Also, for the kind of math I was doing, I needed more symbols and structures than was supported, so I had to pull in packages. But the result was a set of notes that, for me, was pleasant to use. Render time? 3s on avg.

Good typeset is important, even if only psychologically.

I explained why I don't want to do this, right?

> Far more importantly, it provides spatio-temporal locality. I add things in chronological order to tbe blog, as I learn thing. If I need to recall something I had studied, go to that location in the blog based on a sense of when. > When I do get to a location I want, the scrollbar gives me a sense of where I am in the file. this is important to me, since it hepls me reason spatially about what i know and what I've learnt. It's someting I love about books, and deeply miss when navigtaing the web.I'm determined to keep this spatio-temporal locality on my little slice of the internet.

And:

> I need a single file to edit, so I can rapidly jot down new ideas. This is the essence of why I'm able to log most of what I study: because it's seamless.

I really wish I _could_ get used to the usual way of doing things, but it just doesn't sit right with me, unfortunately.

I thought those are all about your single markdown source file, not the HTML output. Still, this may work well when the website is sitting on your local disk, but probably not so well when it’s served remotely, especially not when it grows to say 10MB.

I understand your intention, the non-linear hypertext affects cognitive abilities badly in many ways. But your approach has limits. You might have 9000 lines of text now, but any non-trivial corpus of knowledge will make things explode. You have to split the file at some point. Otherwise - in your analogy - you will not read a book, but a library in a linear fashion.