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Comment by em-bee

11 hours ago

i have a static website with a menu. keeping the menu synchronized over the half dozen pages is a pain.

my only option to fix this are javascript, xslt or a server side html generator. (and before you ask, static site generators are no better, they just make the generation part manual instead of automatic.)

i don't actually care if the site is static. i only care that maintenance is simple.

build tools are not simple. they tend to suffer from bitrot because they are not bundled with the hosting of the site or the site content.

server side html generators (aka content management systems, etc.) are large and tie me to a particular platform.

frontend frameworks by default require a build step and of course need javascript in the browser. some frameworks can be included without build tools, and that's better, but also overkill for large sites. and of course then you are tied to the framework.

another option is writing custom javascript code to include an html snippet from another file.

or maybe i can try to rig include with xslt. will that shut up the people who want to view my site without javascript?

at some point there was discussion for html include, but it has been dropped. why?

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em-bee

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bambax  8 hours ago

> i have a static website with a menu. keeping the menu synchronized over the half dozen pages is a pain

You can totally do that with PHP? It can find all the pages, generate the menu, transform markdown to html for the current page, all on the fly in one go, and it feels instantaneous. If you experience some level of traffic you can put a CDN in front but usually it's not even necessary.

  • em-bee  7 hours ago

    that's the server side html generator i already mentioned. ok, this one is not large, but it still ties me to a limited set of server platforms that support running php. and if i have to write code i may as well write javascript and get a platform independent solution.

    the point is, none of the solutions are completely satisfactory. every approach has its downsides. but most critically, all this complaining about people picking the wrong solution is just bickering that my chosen solution does not align with their preference.

    my preferred solution btw is to take a build-less frontend framework, and build my site with that. i did that with aurelia, and recently built a proof of concept with react.

    • ndriscoll  6 hours ago

      You didn't actually indicate a downside to using xslt, and yes it would fit your use case of a static include for a shared menu, though the better way to do it is to move all of the shared pieces of your site into the template and then each page is just its content. Sort of like using a shared CSS file.

      To just do the menu, if your site is xhtml, IIRC you could link to the template, use a <my-menu> in the page, and then the template just gives a rule to expand that to your menu.

      2 replies →

rsolva  10 hours ago

I recently tried building a website using Server Side Includes (SSI) with apache/nginx to make templates for the head, header and footer. Then I found myself missing the way Hugo does things, using a base template and injecting the content into the base template instead.

This was easy do achieve with PHP with a super minimal setup, so I thought, why not? Still no build steps!

PHP is quite ubiquitous and stable these days so it is practically equivalent to making a static site. Just a few sprinkles of dynamism to avoid repeting HTML all over the place.