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I think it's true that many sites are over engineered for what they are. Does a site that's primarily for reading articles really need to be an SPA? Why can't y

I think it's true that many sites are over engineered for what they are. Does a site that's primarily for reading articles really need to be an SPA? Why can't your sign in fallback to being a simple form? Etc. Then again it can actually be pretty easy to over engineer nowadays. Once you have your node/npm environment set up with webpack and all the rest you can quickly iterate a new site based on an earlier project. And if you hear of something new and cool it's only an npm command and a few hooks away.

weegee101 8y ago
You're right, it is easy to over engineer sites these days. It boils down to tooling for SPAs vs traditional static sites. The tooling for making static sites, even the most modern tooling such as Hugo or Jekyll, simply pales in comparison to libraries such as React, Vue, or others. The author is absolutely right that developers are attracted to shiny new objects, and the interest of the greater community is focused on SPA libraries when we should be equally (or arguably, more) focused on static site generation libraries as well.
paulie_a 8y ago
An npm command that leads to dependency hell because jsland has to have a thousand packages. A complicated python codebase can be less than 20-50.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
toss1 8y ago
Aaaaaannnd right there's the problem -- easier for the one or few developers, harder for the thousands or millions of users. Where are the tools for making streamlined sites easier to build? What happened to the old contest for teh best site in 5kb [1]? We need those brought back -- seriously. [1] https://the5k.org/ https://the5k.org/
komali2 8y ago
What I've been thinking about ever since I learned about web brutalism is - how can I make simple, HTML focused websites, static? That is to say, not requiring a backend I build to generate the necessary HTML and serve it as a document to a given url? So index.html is easy, but is there a way to make it such that I can go to my website/articles/my-happy-day, and have that page be generated, rather than a separate handwritten my-happy-day.html file? I typically "deploy" simple shit by uploading it directly to my bluehost filesystem, or Amazon s3. The only thing I can think of is a precompile thing, and then uploading the build.
- UweSchmidt 8y ago
  I'm sure you know about static site generators like https://jekyllrb.com/ https://jekyllrb.com/. Are those what you have in mind?
  - komali2 8y ago
    I have heard of them but I've yet to try them. I guess I'm trying to figure out if there's some way to basically duplicate the idea of an SPA (using client-side templating or whatever) without all the overhead. I think you're right, that static site generators fill that gap, or perhaps just server-side rendering with very little JavaScript on the frontend.

weegee101 8y ago

You're right, it is easy to over engineer sites these days. It boils down to tooling for SPAs vs traditional static sites. The tooling for making static sites, even the most modern tooling such as Hugo or Jekyll, simply pales in comparison to libraries such as React, Vue, or others. The author is absolutely right that developers are attracted to shiny new objects, and the interest of the greater community is focused on SPA libraries when we should be equally (or arguably, more) focused on static site generation libraries as well.

paulie_a 8y ago

An npm command that leads to dependency hell because jsland has to have a thousand packages. A complicated python codebase can be less than 20-50.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

toss1 8y ago

Aaaaaannnd right there's the problem -- easier for the one or few developers, harder for the thousands or millions of users. Where are the tools for making streamlined sites easier to build? What happened to the old contest for teh best site in 5kb [1]? We need those brought back -- seriously. [1] https://the5k.org/ https://the5k.org/

komali2 8y ago

What I've been thinking about ever since I learned about web brutalism is - how can I make simple, HTML focused websites, static? That is to say, not requiring a backend I build to generate the necessary HTML and serve it as a document to a given url? So index.html is easy, but is there a way to make it such that I can go to my website/articles/my-happy-day, and have that page be generated, rather than a separate handwritten my-happy-day.html file? I typically "deploy" simple shit by uploading it directly to my bluehost filesystem, or Amazon s3. The only thing I can think of is a precompile thing, and then uploading the build.

UweSchmidt 8y ago
I'm sure you know about static site generators like https://jekyllrb.com/ https://jekyllrb.com/. Are those what you have in mind?
- komali2 8y ago
  I have heard of them but I've yet to try them. I guess I'm trying to figure out if there's some way to basically duplicate the idea of an SPA (using client-side templating or whatever) without all the overhead. I think you're right, that static site generators fill that gap, or perhaps just server-side rendering with very little JavaScript on the frontend.