Built a force-directed graph of my research lineage in one HTML file, more serendipitously than deliberately, from scratch, no D3, no React, no build step, no dependencies.

About 70 nodes, about 100 edges. Real publications, real DOIs, real relationships: citational, methodological, generational.

This was serendipitous. Slipped past the abstraction layer, got close to the mechanism, and the next thing I knew Coulomb repulsion and Hooke springs were carrying my scholarly corpus around the screen.

The constraint that mattered was archival durability. If a browser cannot still render the artifact in 2045, then for my purposes it failed.

It runs at FCP 0.768s, LCP 0.768s, TBT 0.027s, with two requests total. Keyboard traversal, ARIA, screen reader support, battery-aware freezing on mobile.

I have written HTML for a long time, but only recently started working this close to primitives. They feel like a dusty old book, neglected, unfashionable, and still full of load-bearing ideas. It also works on a shit phone.

I am not against the frameworks. I like frameworks and NPM, I just want the artifact to outlive them...At some point it stopped feeling like a twenty-pound dictionary and started feeling like a wrench.

Live: https://tjid3.org/test/kg12.74

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19337250