Comment by culi
4 days ago
> Yes, you must copy and paste content
Many people who maintain their own sites in vanilla web technologies tend to create reusable functions to handle this for them. It can generate headers and the like dynamically so you don't have to change it on every single page. Though that does kill the "no javascript required" aspect a lot of people like
Of course you could simply add a build step to your pure HTML site instead!
I recently learned the object tag can do what I wished for in the 90s... work as an include tag:
Turn your back for twenty-five years, and be amazed at what they've come up with! ;-)
Should reduce a lot of boilerplate that would get out of sync on my next project, without need for templating.
Hey, I need to try this out, so it is like iframe except the frame part and all its issues?
Unfortunately that will require the client to make additional web requests to load the page, effectively doubling latency at a minimum.
A few extra <object> in a blog post is a worthwhile tradeoff, if you're literally using raw HTML.
- HTTP/1.1 (1997) already reuses connections, so it will not double latency. The DNS lookup and the TCP connection are a high fixed cost for the first .html request.
- HTTP/2 (2015) further reduces the cost of subsequent requests, with a bunch of techniques, like dictionary compression.
- You will likely still be 10x faster than a typical "modern" page with JavaScript, which has to load the JS first, and then execute it. The tradeoff has flipped now, where execution latency for JS / DOM reflows can be higher than network latency. So using raw HTML means you are already far ahead of the pack.
So say you have a 50 ms time for the initial .html request. Then adding some <object> might bring you to 55 ms, 60 ms, 80 ms, 100 ms.
But you would have to do something pretty bad to get to 300 ms or 1500 ms, which you can easily see on the modern web.
So yes go ahead and add those <object> tags, if it means you can get by with no toolchain. Personally I use Markdown and some custom Python scripts to generate the header and footer.
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Sounds like premature optimization for a simple page. If the objects are sized their regions should be fillable afterward without need to resize and be cached for subsequent access.
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I didn't know you could use object tags in that way! Thanks. That seems like a great solution if you're cool with an extra request
Couldn't you sort of do that using server side includes back en the 90s? Assuming that your web server supported it.
Yes, and a Makefile was an option as well. But an include tag was a no-brainer not long after html was invented. Especially after img, link, applet, frame, etc were implemented.
I've adopted the idea that a blog post is archived when it's published; I don't want to tinker with it again. Old pages may have an old style, but that's OK, it's an archive. Copy/paste works great for this.
The only reason I use a blog engine now (Hugo) is for RSS. I kept messing up or forgetting manual RSS edits.
I really love this! I've seen it in action a couple times in the wild, and it's super cool seeing how the site's design has evolved over time.
It also has the benefit of forcing you to keep your URIs stable. Cool URIs don't change: https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html
Or, let me be cheeky: you could add some `<php include('header.html')?>` in your html.
> It can generate headers and the like dynamically so you don't have to change it on every single pa
Yeah, I noped out of that and use a client-side include (webcomponent) so that my html can have `<include-remote remote-src='....'>` instead.
Sure, it requires JS to be enabled for the webcomponent to work, but I'm fine with that.
See https://www.lelanthran.com for an example.
[EDIT: Dammit, my blog doesn't use that webcomponent anymore! Here's an actual production usage of it: https://demo.skillful-training.com/project/webroot/ (use usernames (one..ten)@example.com and password '1' if you want to see more usage of it)]
yeah clearly there's a lot of ways to solve this issue if javascript is enabled. But there's a big overlap between the folks who wanna use vanilla web technologies and the folks who want their site to run without javascript
Isn't using React with a static site generator framework basically the same thing but better?
Not remotely! Unless you meant Preact. React ships an entire rendering engine to the front-end. Most sites that use React won't load anything if javascript isn't enabled
Then you'd have to learn React, and for many of us the point is that we really don't want to learn React, or other frontend frameworks.
Yes, if you want to throw up in your mouth.
In theory yes, in practice good luck maintaining that if you are just a solo blogger.
I doubt your blog would last a single month without some breaking change of some sort in one of the packages.
you mean npm packages? why would you need to update those anyhow?
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Yes, it is. Unfortunately HN has a crazy bias against JavaScript (the least crazy part of the web stack) and in favour of HTML and CSS, even though the latter are worse in every meaningful way.
It isn't crazy, judging by the number of times I've seen posts here and on other blogs talking about a 100k web page ballooning to 8Mb because of all the Javascript needed to "collect page analytics" or do user tracking when ads are included. Granted that may not be needed for personal websites, but for almost anything that has to be monetized you're going to get stuck with JS cancer because some sphincter in a suit needs for "number to go up".
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I don't even know where to begin with the pretence that you can compare HTML with JS and somehow conclude that one is 'better' than the other. They are totally different things. JS is for functionality, and if you're using it to serve static content, you're not using it as designed.
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