Comment by hombre_fatal
8 days ago
What do you mean?
JSX compiles to jsx(“div”, props, children) function calls so you need a runtime (which can be small) to render that into strings.
At which point, who cares if you’re using react to do it? It’s a good zero dep implementation of a jsx fn.
Yeah, but this function needn’t run in the browser. Just generate HTML with it and save into a file! (I don’t have a link to npm handy, but I’m sure there’s a library that can do that already.)
Alternatively, you can use Astro with React components, which will render them using React-DOM, but save them as static HTML by default (you can still choose some components to be hydrated, though).
The article in question is specifically about using Next.js to do what you are saying (generate static HTML files from a set of React components). He also mentions using Astro for it.
Good point, though the article mostly discusses static site generation (no server-side JS) and I think we can take it a step further and have no runtime / client-side JS as well.
Next.js does usually have the runtime part, but I imagine it’s not too hard to disable (or you can strip all JS from the output). Astro, like I mentioned, strips JS by default (from island components, not from .astro components, though you can usually use those without any client-side JS, too).
It is kinda roundabout way of generating HTML from JSX though.