Boat Rudder is here: one website, every browser

Boat Rudder, a content manager built for the whole history of the web, is officially out. The idea behind it is simple: the same site should open on a phone from 1999, on a text-only browser, and on whatever you are reading this with right now. Not a stripped-down copy parked at a separate address, but the same articles, the same navigation, and the same pictures wherever pictures can be shown.

Boat Rudder: WML, TEXT, HTML 3.2, HTML4+CSS, HTML5+CSS3

Five versions of every page

When someone arrives, Boat Rudder reads what their browser says about itself and picks one of five ways to build the page. A WAP phone from the early 2000s gets a simple card it can actually display. A text browser gets clean headings and links with no decoration. A mid-90s browser gets a table-based layout. A browser from the 2000s gets basic styling. Everyone else gets the modern, responsive version.

WAP phones - a simple card, text and links only
Text browsers such as Lynx - headings and links, nothing else
Mid-90s browsers - table layouts, no stylesheets
Early 2000s browsers - simple styling
Browsers of today - the full modern layout

Nothing simply disappears

The interesting part is what happens to the things an old browser cannot handle. A video does not vanish: it becomes a printed QR code that a phone can scan. A photo gallery becomes a list of links. A large picture becomes a lighter one that a 1994 machine can actually load, and following it opens the full-size file. The article keeps its shape everywhere; only the presentation changes.

Written once, read in two languages

Every article is stored with its translations side by side, so offering a second language does not mean maintaining a second website. This very post is stored as a single document and reads natively in both English and Spanish. Adding a third language is a matter of filling in the blanks, not of copying anything.

Who is it for?

Boat Rudder was built for retro computing enthusiasts who want their own site reachable from the machines they collect, and for anyone who likes the idea of a web page that does not stop working just because it got old. It runs as a single small program, so it is comfortable on modest hardware.