[HN Gopher] In defence of the boring web
___________________________________________________________________
In defence of the boring web
Author : Topolomancer
Score : 140 points
Date : 2022-01-30 14:52 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bastian.rieck.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (bastian.rieck.me)
| christophilus wrote:
| Good read. Loaded fast. Looked great on my old iPhone. Very nice
| use of font size and line height. A+
| cblconfederate wrote:
| That's a blog, not 'the web'
| zinekeller wrote:
| > That's a blog, not 'the web'
|
| The original web as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee is basically
| a collection of internetworked and interconnected documents,
| which a blog is definitely a part of it. Blame Google's
| ChromeOS ambitions (especially pre-Android integration) for
| opening the Pandora's Box of WebApps.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Blame Google's ChromeOS ambitions (especially pre-Android
| integration) for opening the Pandora's Box of WebApps._
|
| Chrome OS is 2011 (first announced 2009). But before that,
| lots of people wanted the power of so-called "web apps" in
| the 1990s as we can see from various technologies getting
| introduced. And some even before Google incorporated in 1998:
|
| - ~1995 Sun Java plugin for browsers
|
| - ~1995 Netscape Navigator added Javascript
|
| - ~1996 Macromedia Flash plugin
|
| - ~1999 Microsoft IE XMLHttpRequest() function to fetch
| dynamic data
|
| - ... many others I forgot
|
| In 1998, I was able to order airline tickets on the internet
| for the first time on US Air and Southwest Airlines websites.
| In 1996, Mapquest had online maps to calculate driving
| directions. At this early stage, we're already past the
| "world wide web is only static documents" idea.
| kingcharles wrote:
| I built a "Google Docs" in 1997 using Java applets
| (couldn't raise funds, too early). And HoTMaiL had launched
| the previous year, bringing email to the web, which is
| certainly one of the closest things I can think of to the
| first "web app".
|
| WikiWikiWeb launched in early 1995. I'm trying to think
| what could classify as the first "web app"? I was on the
| Web in 1993 and there wasn't much of any use on there.
| Writing web apps was hard because there were no tools for
| it. I ended up writing most of my back end code in C. Which
| sounds crazy until I realize I'm writing it all in C# now.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb
| chasd00 wrote:
| To me, it was cookies that opened the pandora's box of
| webapps. Cookies are what made user sessions, shopping carts,
| and everything else possible.
| z3t4 wrote:
| > I am not using JavaScript, except for a minimal installation of
| MathJax to be able to render equations in blog posts (and I know
| of no other simple way to accomplish this goal).
|
| You can pre-render svg images
| ectopod wrote:
| You can use pandoc to get html+mathml, which renders in Firefox
| with no JS.
|
| Chrome users can get an extension to render the mathml. Or you
| can add mathjax to your page, but I don't bother.
| cageface wrote:
| It's good advice to use the simplest tool that gets the job done.
| I like sites like this too.
|
| But let's not jump from this to the conclusion that everything on
| the web should be built this way. There's a place for things like
| Figma too.
| nesarkvechnep wrote:
| Maybe Figma should've been a desktop app.
| cageface wrote:
| Being a web app that runs everywhere and is always up to date
| is a big part of Figma's success. They've already crushed a
| very strong native desktop competitor.
| [deleted]
| cblconfederate wrote:
| The problem is not the website that uses wordpress instead of
| some 'artisanal' static site generator. The former is something
| that mom and pop can self-host, the latter is something the
| aspiring programmer enjoys doing. The problem is that modern
| browser programming, and modern javascript in particular are way
| more complicated than they need to be for people to build their
| own websites. That's why everyone moves their communities in
| discord instead of building a self-hosted chat. The browsers are
| powerful today, but the APIs can be really complex. I have webrtc
| in mind in particular, dealing with that is something that easily
| can demoralize someone who is not a professional programmer. Even
| in the old days of Flash, you could host a Red5 server on a VPS
| and have a video conferencing app going, nowadays most people go
| with SaaS solutions because it's too damn hard. We need to be
| talking about how to make the browser an accessible platform wher
| everyone can build (including moms and pops, remember
| Frontpage?). NOT to keep over-complicating even the smallest
| tasks in order to please the BigCorps (looking at you, CSS
| complexity). Instead of another framework let's bring in more
| <tags> (Hello, <marquee>)
| zzo38computer wrote:
| Yes, but there are a few things you should consider too:
|
| * Avoid CSS, too. (Fortunately the program I have, has the option
| to disable CSS, so I use that and it looks better, then.)
|
| * There should be a better way to display math equations (e.g.
| using MathML, possibly with a JavaScript code that only executes
| if MathML is not implemented in the client)
|
| I usually just use plain text files myself. However, Fossil uses
| HTML, and I would prefer to make it a different HTML. I started
| to make one using libfossil, but have not completed it yet and it
| lacks some features.
| ngrilly wrote:
| Why should we totally avoid CSS? The default CSS is most web
| browsers is not great for reading (no maximum width, mo margin,
| etc.).
| zzo38computer wrote:
| Well, at least I prefer the default CSS (with only a few
| exceptions; I think "img { max-width: 100%; }" aught to be a
| default rule). However, they should be configurable by the
| end user to the settings that that user wants, instead of
| being different in different web pages.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| I agree with the article's points that many of today's websites
| are bloated and user-hostile. A 'spartan' website like that is a
| refreshing change. I'd add one more virtue to the list: it
| doesn't deliberately break Reader Mode.
|
| The ideas listed are similar to those of the sadly overlooked
| IndieWeb community, [0][1] and they complement them. Ideally, the
| web should be both indie and boring.
|
| [0] https://indieweb.org/
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IndieWeb
| schemescape wrote:
| The author mentions using server logs for understanding traffic:
|
| > I am not using any cookies or additional ways of user tracking.
| Instead, I am using GoAccess to generate static reports based on
| the webserver logs--no user-facing parts are involved, and IP
| addresses are anonymised.
|
| I've considered doing this as well, but I'd prefer not to have to
| run and maintain my own server, if possible.
|
| Is anyone aware of a cheap hosting service for static sites that
| provides HTTP logs (even if only in aggregate)?
| whiplash451 wrote:
| I believe OVH offers what you are looking for (website hosting
| with HTTP logs and aggregated statistics, I leave it to you to
| look at pricing and decide whether it is cheap in your
| reference frame).
| jbboehr wrote:
| Only answering with what I'm familiar with, but AWS S3 provides
| access logs:
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/Server...
| bachmeier wrote:
| > I am not using JavaScript, except for a minimal installation of
| MathJax to be able to render equations
|
| This is the part I don't get. I know, many commenters on this
| site don't like Javascript, but a little Javascript isn't going
| to slow your site down. Conversely, you can completely avoid
| Javascript by doing a bunch of work on the server, yet slow your
| site just as badly as with Javascript (or even worse). It would
| be more productive to talk about the type of content rather than
| the arbitrary choice of technology used to create the page.
| ozim wrote:
| Yes, 100 times yes if you are really delivering documents to the
| browser.
|
| It is a totally different thing if one is delivering 'web
| application'.
|
| Web application is about manipulating data, having lists, text
| fields and editing content.
|
| Delivering documents is about documentation, blogs, prose, maybe
| just image browsing.
|
| If company is crapping JS/tracking all over content that can be
| delivered as a document it is annoying.
|
| Just don't say that everything should be sans JS - because there
| are legitimate uses of JS and even those heavy JS frameworks if
| one is building rich editing experience.
| austincheney wrote:
| > It is a totally different thing if one is delivering 'web
| application'.
|
| Why? I think the unspoken alternative to boring is gross
| negligent incompetence.
|
| It really doesn't have to be that way. The web is 30 years old,
| JavaScript is 25 years old, and the mature DOM is 23 years old.
| Surely by now somebody can figure out how to dynamically add
| text to the screen with less than 10mb of JS taking less than
| 10 seconds to execute.
|
| As a counter point I have written an OS GUI that is 2mb
| unminified and loads in the browser in about 55ms (give or take
| 5ms) including full state restoration. That's pretty fast.
| Looking at various benchmarks JavaScript is now executing as
| fast as Java in many micro-benchmarks.
|
| If this stuff is really that fast why we do we tolerate such
| incompetence writing frontend code? It's like incompetence is
| built in by default as the standard expectation and everybody
| hires accordingly.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Surely by now somebody can figure out how to dynamically
| add text to the screen with less than 10mb of JS taking less
| than 10 seconds to execute.
|
| Yes, we have that now. I made a tiny webpage for playing with
| substitution ciphers, all in client-side JS (and CSS):
| https://thaumasiotes.github.io/cryptogram/
|
| Try putting text in the textarea on the left and see how long
| it takes for the page to update.
| pid-1 wrote:
| IMO most of the complexity of the web comes from 2
| shortcomings:
|
| 1 - It's hard to reuse HTML. Consequently, even static sites
| need some sort of build step.
|
| 2 - HTML needed something like htmx, so every component could
| be updated dynamically without writing JS code.
|
| According to my estimations, if (1) and (2) were native to
| HTML, 93% of all websites wouldn't need JS.
| [deleted]
| mdoms wrote:
| > Why? I think the unspoken alternative to boring is gross
| negligent incompetence.
|
| That's.... that's just silly. How would you deliver, say,
| Trello as a boring website? Or Google Maps? Or Grafana? Do
| you really think the developers of these apps are grossly
| negligent?
| JadeNB wrote:
| > That's.... that's just silly. How would you deliver, say,
| Trello as a boring website? Or Google Maps? Or Grafana? Do
| you really think the developers of these apps are grossly
| negligent?
|
| Of those, I've used only Google Maps. Like Google itself,
| GMaps was great when it started! And they continue adding
| new _knowledge_ to it that makes it more useful. But, like
| Google itself (though not as bad), when it comes to the
| _interface_ it feels like there 's mostly change just for
| the sake of change, with little thought given to whether
| it's good or bad change, so long as it's new.
|
| (I compare it to the StackExchange empire, which seems to
| suffer a similar churn mostly for the sake of the
| appearance of motion and of novelty.)
| echelon wrote:
| I spend 90+% of my time on the web reading and writing.
| Only 5 - 10% using web "apps".
|
| The web stack leaned too heavily into application
| development, but its primary use is still in delivering
| rich text.
| austincheney wrote:
| Regardless, why does the experience differ so
| significantly? It clearly isn't due to execution speed of
| the technology. Is it a leadership problem, a training
| problem, or something else? What's missing?
| mrkentutbabi wrote:
| Wow just the right moment, I am thinking to setup my own blog.
| Commenting for bookMark.
| MandieD wrote:
| There's a very faint, tiny "favorite" in the line of faint,
| tiny links right below the title of comment pages for
| bookmarking. It took me about three years on HN to notice it,
| but now I have a wonderful, shareable collection of the
| cleverer things posted here.
| mrkentutbabi wrote:
| Oh I didn't know this. Thank you.
| kingcharles wrote:
| Been using this site for well over a decade (under my old
| handle) and never once noticed that. How is that possible o_O
| susam wrote:
| I use a very similar stack to host my personal website that
| contains a blog and a collection of other pages. Here are the
| similarities between my stack and that of the author of this
| post:
|
| - No JavaScript except for loading MathJax only on those pages
| that contain mathematical equations.
|
| - No cookies, no banners, no account creation, no ads, no
| affiliate links.
|
| - All content and code is stored in a Git repository.
|
| - The HTML files are served using Nginx.
|
| - The website is hosted on a Debian system.
|
| - No load balancer, no database, no cache server, etc.
|
| However, there are some differences too. Here are the differences
| between my stack and that of the author of this post:
|
| - All my content is written in plain HTML. Some of the content in
| my website goes back to 2001 when the obvious way to write
| content was in plain HTML. I know that Markdown can be easier to
| write and read and I do use Markdown for GitHub READMEs. However,
| for my website, I just stayed back with HTML.
|
| - I have my own small Common Lisp program to generate the static
| HTML files. It picks all the content HTML files, puts them within
| a common HTML template to ensure headers and footers are
| consistent across pages, generates a blog post list page,
| generates RSS feeds, etc.
|
| By the way, I use Emacs for editing HTML. Its HTML+ mode has a
| pretty good collection of key sequences for editing HTML. For
| example, the key sequence C-c 2 inserts "<h2></h2>" and places
| the cursor in between the tags so that I can start typing the
| heading immediately, C-C C-o enters an arbitrary tag along with
| its closing pair (if applicable) and places the cursor in between
| the tags, C-c C-e automatically closes any open tag, etc. These
| key sequences along with automatic indentation of nested HTML
| elements by Emacs does a really good job at making editing plain
| HTML very convenient.
| cutler wrote:
| I worked with Perl's Template::Toolkit for many years and would
| still recommend it for static site generation. TT3 is the
| current version.
| klodolph wrote:
| I've also stuck with plain HTML for my personal website, and
| stayed away from stuff like Markdown. It feels like too often,
| with Markdown, I'd be figuring out questions like "how do I get
| Markdown to emit the HTML that I want?"
|
| It's not like Markdown saves me that much typing over HTML in
| the first place, and the HTML is a lot easier to think about.
|
| And yes... Emacs is my HTML editor of choice, too.
| Topolomancer wrote:
| Very much in the spirit of Jeff Huang:
| https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/
|
| I have to admit that I like the 'bare' feeling of
| Markdown...it just looks a little bit 'cleaner' to me (quotes
| here because that is super subjective).
| masswerk wrote:
| I don't really get the saving or convenience of Markdown,
| esp., if you are already used to typing HTM. (HTML for simple
| things is easy and short enough, and fancy things are beyond
| Markdown anyways.)
|
| Here's my stack:
|
| Hosted webspace (yes, like it's the 1990s!) Apache/Unix,
| simple PHP templates for headers and footers, basic
| navigation, etc w/o JS, for the blog a custom (server-side)
| script generating virtual article locations, navigation, meta
| data, basic chrome, and a RRS feed from a simple data-file
| and reading static HTML for the content from static files.
| BBEdit for editing. No analytics. (The webspace comes with
| Webalizer, but this stopped working some 10 years ago. I
| don't care.)
|
| And yes, there are special pages with full-fledged JS apps,
| as well, or blog posts featuring complex things, so nothing
| is chiseled in stone. If there's a purpose to it. However, a
| visitor should be able to get an idea what a page is about
| without JS.
| softwarebeware wrote:
| You should be able to write HTML into any Markdown document
| therefore having the best of both worlds
| klodolph wrote:
| To be perfectly honest, that sounds terrible. Like, just
| completely awful. I definitely don't want to do that.
|
| HTML by itself is easy enough to work with. The syntax for
| HTML is pretty basic. A little verbose sometimes, but since
| the late 1990s it has not been hard to find a text editor
| that will do things like autoindent and insert closing tags
| automatically.
|
| Markdown introduces a ton of weird syntax to save you a
| little bit of typing. That's a good tradeoff when you are
| striving to keep people engaged with your site... that's
| the reason why Markdown is used on places like Stack
| Overflow, Reddit, a bunch of blogs, etc. Asking people to
| learn how to use BBCode is a kinda tall order compared to
| Markdown.
|
| However, the cost-benefit of Markdown is completely
| different on a my personal blog. I'm using somewhat more
| complicated stuff on my blog... a few standard elements
| like boxes that say "note", a couple charts here and there
| with D3, occasionally something interactive, maybe some
| math with KaTeX. It's not super-complicated stuff, but it's
| stuff that's often no fun to try and write in Markdown.
| Even <table> is nicer in HTML than Markdown.
|
| I would rather deal with one simple syntax (HTML) rather
| than a weird mix of two syntaxes (HTML + Markdown) where
| one of them (Markdown) has bunch of weird edge cases. As
| far as I can tell, the main benefit of Markdown for
| personal blogs is that it's slightly less typing. Not
| exactly a killer feature in my eyes. (It's also very
| frustrating when trying to write technical documentation.)
| umvi wrote:
| Yep I recently did exactly this for my personal site as well
| (including initially writing HTML by hand), but instead of lisp
| I wrote a ~100 line python script[0] so that I could write
| future content in Markdown instead of HTML. Yes I'm aware of
| Jekyll and Hugo and such, but even those were too complex for
| my personal site. It only took about an hour of my time to
| write it, and now anytime I push markdown changes to my git
| repository, GitHub Actions runs the markdown through the python
| script and generates the site which is hosted on GitHub pages.
|
| [0] For the curious -
| https://gist.github.com/RPGillespie6/b133854b8ebf5a983cf32c2...
| Shared404 wrote:
| I'll jump on this bandwagon too.
|
| I did it in Rust, because I wanted to learn Rust.
|
| It just takes a directory structure with markdown files, and
| converts each file to HTML while adding a header and footer.
| I use it on a few sites now, and honestly I should redo the
| code but it works conveniently and I have other stuff to do.
|
| Oh, and my stack is nginx on Alpine currently.
|
| Edit:
|
| Code is here: https://git.sr.ht/~evan-hoose/SSSSS
|
| It really is not great code. It even shells out to markdown
| to do the rendering - bad for all sorts of obvious reasons.
| (but the right choice for my use case).
|
| If you want to use it, be my guest. Just know that it's bad
| and ugly and you could write it better yourself in not very
| long.
| qchris wrote:
| Jumping on the bandwagon of the guy that jumped on the
| bandwagon, because you mentioned potentially re-doing your
| own code at some point so might be interested: my personal
| site [0] looks very much like this (and is also written in
| Rust), but uses the comrak [1] crate to convert blog posts
| from Markdown to HTML on the fly before formatting with the
| header/footer theme. Using comrak lets you write in-line
| HTML (so you're not stuck with only Markdown syntax if you
| want to do something fancier like code blocks or
| <math></math>), and the whole site ends up <150 LoC,
| including route definitions.
|
| It handled the one potential HN hug-of-death event I've had
| without issues while running on the smallest DO droplet
| offered, and has basically been issue-free since I got it
| up and running.
|
| [0] https://github.com/quietlychris/site
|
| [1] https://github.com/kivikakk/comrak
| Shared404 wrote:
| Looks interesting, thanks!
|
| I may very well do something similar at some point,
| though I've also thought about using it as an excuse to
| redo whenever I want to learn $LANGUAGE, or writing a
| markdown (or subset of markdown) interpreter at some
| point.
|
| Definitely going to read through the code more closely as
| well - I've been meaning to find some short and well
| written Rust.
| z3t4 wrote:
| > I am using Hugo,2 a static website generator, to generate,
| well, static HTML files.
|
| Many people think it's a binary option of handwriting HTML vs
| using WordPress, but with a static site generator you get the
| advantage of both. I think static site generator are still
| exiting technology. Also companies are still sending Word-files
| to each other, while you are using git, and the web to publish,
| so you are still 30 years ahead of the rest - who are trying to
| get ahead by taking short-cuts like jumping on the latest hype
| train.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Many people think it 's a binary option of handwriting HTML
| vs using WordPress..._
|
| It's worth noting that one can handwrite HTML for WordPress
| themes and emit static sites from WordPress. This is a great
| option for those who like SSGs but want rich content
| management.
|
| Another option for this is to use WordPress as the CMS for your
| SSG. For example, this post describes how to use Gatsby with
| WordPress: https://liftoffllc.medium.com/gatsby-wordpress-
| bringing-toge...
| d12bb wrote:
| JavaScript is not the problem. That people forgot how to use the
| simplest tool to get the job done, and to not use more than
| needed, that's the problem.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > I am not using a load balancer, a database, or a cache server.
|
| But it's serving some static assets from CloudFlare... (nothing
| wrong with that: I'm just pointing it out)
| Topolomancer wrote:
| OP here---true dat; that's the MathJax script. To be honest, I
| haven't yet come around moving away from it, but this thread
| mentions some alternatives.
| chrischapman wrote:
| Nice read. Firm supporter of Web Pi (3.1415). When it comes to
| building for the web today, I'm always amazed that "so much can
| be done with so little" and yet the default is the opposite - "so
| much is needed to deliver so little" - so irrational! Where did
| we go wrong? I wonder what Web Euler (2.71828) would have looked
| like?
| susam wrote:
| My favourite phase of the web was Web Golden (1.61803). :) It
| mostly had static websites but some websites had tiny
| guestbooks that allowed a little user-generated content.
|
| I remember some of the website hosting providers made it really
| easy to add guestbooks, even for someone with no programming
| experience. All one needed to do was create an HTML page that
| contained a <form> element with the "action" attribute set to a
| URL of a server-side script provided by the hosting provider.
| The server-side script would accept every comment submitted via
| the guestbook and automatically insert the new comment into a
| static HTML page after escaping the special characters
| properly.
| Topolomancer wrote:
| A fellow supporter! Maybe you like my manifesto from the 'olden
| days:' http://web3.14159.annwfn.net/
|
| I was full of vim and vigour then, now I'm only full of `vim`.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I'm not in that part of IT; what is WebPi in this context? My
| mind went to some RaspberryPi stack, but perhaps it is this
| instead? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Platform_Installer
| david_van_loon wrote:
| In this context it is a play on the Web 2.0 and Web3
| terminology.
| thfuran wrote:
| One that means what?
| luxpir wrote:
| A number greater than 2 and less than 3, or slightly
| beyond 3. Come on guys, grab a coffee.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| The grifters were just making sure they didn't miss out
| on a recent rebranding effort.
| chubot wrote:
| I'm not sure I would frame it as "boring" ... the issue is that
| CONTENT (which should be interesting, and is what people are
| there for) is obscured by TECH.
|
| So the tech should get out of the way of the content, instead of
| asserting itself front and center. That is "exciting" to me.
|
| https://hiccupfx.telnet.asia/ -- Get that "Client Side Render"
| Look
|
| https://lobste.rs/s/oybdsa/get_client_side_render_look
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| >I am not using JavaScript, except for a minimal installation of
| MathJax to be able to render equations in blog posts (and I know
| of no other simple way to accomplish this goal).
|
| I remember MathML support used to be bad. Is it still the case?
| runarberg wrote:
| I think support is being actively work on for Chrome and is
| behind a feature flag.
|
| https://caniuse.com/mathml
| jraph wrote:
| MathML support in Chromium is pushed by Igalia:
| https://mathml.igalia.com/
| extra88 wrote:
| Not only is browser MathML support lacking, authoring MathML
| kind of sucks. Anyone familiar with the basics of LaTeX for
| mathematical equations (human-readable LaTeX) will prefer to
| write that and let someone else's code render it (as MathML, as
| SVG, as a raster image).
| klodolph wrote:
| "Boring" is nice although my experience with Hugo is that it
| takes a nontrivial amount of effort to get it working in the
| first place, such that I couldn't use it for putting project
| documentation on github.io and _definitely_ wouldn 't call it
| "boring" in the sense used in the article. It is definitely a
| more complex scheme even if that complexity is front-loaded and
| you get to keep everything boring on the server and the client
| (with the exception of MathJax, for good reasons). (Aside:
| consider Katex!)
|
| With Hugo, I ended up fighting with themes that wouldn't render
| correctly, and all the mess that is shortcodes. Shortcodes are
| nice in theory, but there should be a larger set of "standard"
| shortcodes that are expected to work across most themes (some
| nice subset of what Bootstrap gives you) and instead of custom
| syntax, it seems like you should be able to use standard HTML
| with custom tags.
|
| Anyway... my experience with Hugo made me feel that I would even
| have an easier time wrangling a Wordpress installation. It's
| equally possible to archive a Wordpress site by taking a snapshot
| of the HTML, and I've done it, it's just that the "boring" web
| (as the author puts it) moves the failure points to your personal
| computer, rather than the server you run your site on.
| eddieh wrote:
| Yes, please use https://katex.org instead of MathJax.
| susam wrote:
| KaTeX does not support LaTeX commands like \label, \eqref,
| \notag, etc. As long as one does not need them, KaTeX is
| good. But if one needs them, MathJax becomes necessary.
|
| I often do need these commands, especially while writing
| proofs, solutions, or long mathematical posts. See
| https://susam.net/blog/integrating-factor.html for an
| example. These commands make it convenient to refer to
| previous results using equation labels and numbers in long
| articles.
|
| One can work around the missing support for these commands in
| KaTeX by writing their own HTML to simulate the same
| functionality but it is nice to have MathJax do this for us
| automatically.
| Topolomancer wrote:
| Looks awesome, definitely giving it a try. Thanks!
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Looks great, hadn't heard of KaTeX before.
|
| Basic question: does it share any code in common with
| MathJax? If not, why not just run MathJax once server-side
| rather than on the client? Does MathJax have browser-specific
| accommodations, or does it not map to HTML at all, or is it
| something else?
| klodolph wrote:
| Both MathJax and KaTeX let you run once server-side, if
| that's your fancy.
|
| They map to a combination of HTML and MathML, with a bunch
| of CSS rules.
|
| KaTeX's JavaScript code is a mere 68 KB when gzipped. IMO,
| that's worth it, so I don't have to fuss about with Node.js
| as much when generating the site.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Yeah for a one-person personal site Hugo seems like overkill.
|
| For a site that is just a collection of static pages, I think
| it's just as easy to write directly in HTML. HTML is no more
| difficult than learning some other markup language, especially
| if you have an editor that helps you.
| klodolph wrote:
| It may be overkill at first, but run a site for long enough,
| and the static generator starts to make a lot of sense.
|
| I originally had static HTML, but that was well over 10 years
| ago at this point. Soon you want to wrap your pages with a
| template to get rid of boilerplate and keep your site
| consistent. Then you want auto-generated indexes, and maybe
| you want to check for broken links, add width/height to <img>
| tags, etc.
|
| My personal website has hundreds of pages on it, not counting
| the auto-generated index pages. Automation is a necessity at
| this point. It _is_ still written in HTML... I never adopted
| anything like Markdown, and I 've abandoned any use of custom
| syntax like Hugo's or various templating systems, at least,
| outside the static site generator code itself.
| Syonyk wrote:
| The problem with straight HTML, as opposed to one of the
| markdown-to-HTML pipelines, is that if you want to change
| something, it's _really_ difficult (bordering on impossible,
| depending on how consistent you 've been).
|
| I migrated my blog a year and change back from Blogger to
| self hosted Jekyll (a rather consistent theme on this
| post...), and having the content, the "scaffolding" (HTML
| templates and such), and the render pipeline being separate
| means that it's trivial to change things if I want to.
|
| As a recent example, I realized a few months back that my
| blog didn't render _at all_ with Javascript disabled. That 's
| not OK to me (it was a quirk of how the template I bought did
| a "gradual fade in" once the content was loaded - looks good,
| requires JS, I _do not care_ about that sort of thing). To
| eliminate JS requirements, I had to eliminate that fade, and
| I had to change image embedding for a lot of things such that
| it didn 't use lazy load - there was some JS based lazy load
| that meant post thumbnails and such didn't load. All I had to
| do was change the templates, re-render, and re-upload the
| site (I rsync stuff up). That would be harder to change in
| HTML.
|
| The same goes for images and such. I end up with several
| versions of each image used - if your browser supports
| picture sets, it will "pick the best" based on what the
| browser thinks is reasonable, in terms of size and formats. I
| currently render to a few different resolutions of jpg (or
| png) and webp from the original source images. If I want to
| change that, add a new resolution, or add a new format, I
| just update a config file, re-render, and I'm done. That sort
| of thing helps with keeping the site "modern," if you care
| about it.
|
| For an absolutely basic "few pages" site, sure, you can do
| HTML. But for anything with regularly updated content (I have
| ~260 blog posts and nearly 6000 images), it's well worth
| having some helpers to separate content from
| layout/formatting/features/etc. Despite that, it's still very
| much a personal only site, I'm the only author, it (now)
| renders without JS, sets no cookies, etc.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| FWIW you can use any SGML processor to separate-out
| boilerplate from content files using entities (text
| macros), and more advanced forms of HTML templating. Makes
| sense since HTML itself, originally conceived as an SGML
| vocabulary, lacks these authoring features since present in
| the larger SGML context/toolchain. You can also typecheck
| your documents and even format markdown into HTML using
| SGML's SHORTREF feature; checkout [1].
|
| [1]: http://sgmjs.net (my site)
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Hugo and others help with things like autogeneratings tags
| and sidebars, that sort of thing.
| marton_s wrote:
| Jekyll. That's the _boring_ static site generator.
| schemescape wrote:
| What's the boring-est way to run Jekyll locally? My main
| problem with Jekyll is that it required installing (and
| keeping up to date, I assume) a Ruby environment.
| bitexploder wrote:
| I scripted up a dumb little Python+Jinja transformer with a
| dumb yaml file for vars. Its like 50 lines of code. Ifs
| really boring. I also use a little pandoc in my build script
| Topolomancer wrote:
| I have to admit that I found Hugo easier to work with from
| scratch. I am not used to working with Ruby, so I found
| setting up Jekyll to be quite an adventure... (now, truth be
| told, using GitHub to build my pages is definitely easier
| than having to use my own server with Hugo, but the _initial_
| configuration of Jekyll appeared to be more complex for me)
| klodolph wrote:
| I might give Jekyll another shot, then.
| lazyweb wrote:
| Do it! I'm also currently migrating my old Wordpress blog
| to markdown in Jekyll using a minimalist theme [1]. I'm
| liking it so far.
|
| [1] https://github.com/riggraz/no-style-please
| Lio wrote:
| I'm a big Jekyll fan too.
|
| If that's not to your liking I guess you could try pandoc
| and make.
|
| I'm also a fan of vimwiki, but I guess you have to like vim
| for that.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| https://getpublii.com is a great free, open-source option for
| less-technical users who want to generate a static blog that
| can be deployed to any web host (or Cloudflare Pages, Github
| Pages, Netlify, AWS, etc)
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Hugo/Jekyll were thoroughly overkill for my little blog, so I
| went looking at the absolute simplest static site generators I
| could find (with a minor preference for something written in
| rust). I landed on Zola, and hand-coded myself a set of
| templates. It has been working out pretty well.
| brabel wrote:
| Hugo is just one of an incredibly large number of options to
| help you generate your static website.
|
| This list should have something for everyone:
| https://jamstack.org/generators/
|
| There are so many options because creating a simple site
| generator is actually almost trivial, given there are great
| markdown-to-html converters, code highlighting libraries etc.
| that do the hard work for you already.
|
| My own websites are all written in markdown using a little Go
| framework I wrote myself. Extremely simple, does exactly what I
| need, has none of the Hugo complexity (Hugo started simple as
| well but kind of added too many features over time). Highly
| recommend doing this for anyone who enjoy programming and
| writing their own tools.
| FireInsight wrote:
| I like Hugo and made my personal website with it because: 1.
| It's supported on most free hosting like netlify.app (I use
| fleek.co for ipfs support) 2. It allows me to do anything I can
| do without it in a very similar way just with added templating,
| handling navigation, etc 3. I didn't know or care to look for
| comparable alternatives when I started using it and know I'm
| too invested in after making my own theme and converting all my
| wordpress to markdown with the added Hugo cherries on top
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