An Invitation

You are Desired to Accompany the Corps of Your Name Here, late Deceased, from the Dwelling House of Insert Name, by Location, on Day next being the Date of Month, Year. At Hour of the Clock in the Afternoon precisely, to the Parish-Church of Saint Someone, Street Name;

And bring this Ticket with You.

What is this?

This is Invitatio, a website template forked from Kalechips Cardboard Box layout, dressed in the style of a 17th-century funeral invitation. After using their layouts for years, I felt it was only fair to return the favour with this mini-project. Like the original template, the main content stays put as a scroll-box, though here it lives inside several divs. These comprise the invitation itself. If you’re reading on mobile, try a computer to see this display in its entirety.

This template uses the CSS :target technique, as seen on one-page websites such as John doe. If you’d prefer to forego this, you’re free to remove these features and just work with the rest. The demos section will show you several instances of HTML, such as text styling, tables, ASCII, and an appropriately morbid placeholder image. Finally, the credits page sends my loving regards to the free tools and artists, whether they live or not.

Elements & Components

This is slightly more dense than most templates, as this layout calls for verbosity. I am also very proud of it so here I am typing away, hee hee.

Text Formatting

• First we have Bold, Italic and if you're dying to stress it further, Bold italic.
• Now we have Underlined, which you generally want to use for links due to the common associations nowadays. Of course the opposite to accentuating your text is to strike it through like this. You can also mark it like this, instead.
• Sometimes text needs to do less orthodox things, but important ones nonetheless. You can use Small text, for footnotes and other asides. or ^superscript and _subscript notation. Be wary of overusing it for accessibility reasons, not everyone may have the motor precison to hover over an R.I.P. — an abbreviation, as so!
• Finally we have Monospace, for displaying all manners of code and finally An inline quotation, enclosed as a tomb.

Lists

• The worms crawl in!
• The worms crawl out!
• They crawl all over your chin and mouth.
  • They invite their friends and their friends' friends too,
  • And you look like hell when they're—through—with you.

Definition List

Ars Moriendi

“The art of dying well” from its original Latin. A duo of texts dated to about 1415 and 1450, which offer guidance on preparing for a comfortable death.

Funeral Ticket

A printed invitation issued to mourners, frequently for wealthy individuals. The opening quote originates from a funeral ticket for the guests of Mr Samuel Reddington.

Memento Mori

“Remember that you will die” from its original Latin. An artistic motif that reminds its viewers of the inevitability of death.

Blockquote

Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.
-Genesis 3:19

Links & Inline

A link that exists, and a link that's expired. The symbol before it is an Obelus, often placed before names of things that are no longer with us. It's also directly embedded into the css, so you don't have to fiddle about putting them all over the place.

Form Elements

Textarea

Submit to the Grave

Table

ASCII Art

-=[ reapers ]=-  10/98
                      ,____
                      |---.\
              ___     |    `
             / .-\  ./=)
            |  |"|_/\/|
            ;  |-;| /_|
           / \_| |/ \ |
          /      \/\( |
          |   /  |` ) |
          /   \ _/    |
         /--._/  \    |
         `/|)    |    /
           /     |   |
         .'      |   |
  jgs   /         \  |
       (_.-.__.__./  /

Though I have to iron out the kinks on my own site every now and then, you can have ASCII that plays nice with screen-readers! While I'm here, have a tip. LLMs are terrible at replicating ASCII art, so if you need an extra reason to give it a try...

Image

If you're in a site like this, you're probably already aware of how this goes, but don't forget to use your alt-text!

Credits

ASCII

Reaper by jgs, also known as Joan Stark and one of the most famous ASCII artists of the Geocities era. A Github Mirror so kindly keeps her works alive.

Placeholder image

Dance of Death by Hartmann Schedel (1440-1514) for the Nuremberg Chronicle. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons' Danse Macabre category and dithered with doodad.dev's Dither Me This.

Typefaces

Special Gothic and IM Fell English SC, digitised by Igino Marini from the collection of John Fell (bishop), cut by Peter de Walpergen, Oxford, 1693. Both served via the Google Fonts proxy, UpsetDev.

Conclusion

Thank you to anyone who uses this fork. This is my very first layout, and while I don't know if I'll make more, I'm happy to contribute to this side of the web. I wouldn't be in this hobby without the generosity of so many hobbyist webmasters who take their time to create what they do and help us lesser-experienced coders express ourselves, without any expectation of momentary gain. I'll leave you all with a quote from a book that says everything I feel on the matters of mortality.

"By a far-reaching analogy, the dead are blamed for sickness and death: death comes, in other words, from the dead, who, through jealousy, anger, or longing, seek to bring the living into their realm. And to prevent this, the living attempt to neutralize or propitiate the dead — by proper funerary and burial rites, by 'killing' the corpse a second time, or by sacrifice — until the dead have become powerless. This is a condition which, worldwide, tends to correspond not just to when they stop entering one's dreams but also to when their bodies stop undergoing change and are reduced to inert bones. The bare skeleton — in our culture the very symbol of the terror of death — is in other cultures evidence that the dead body is finally safe and that the living are out of harm's way."
Paul Barber, Vampires: Burial and Death, Folklore and Reality

Signed, Pearl.