Not a day goes by when I work on my website that I don't wish for a simpler setup. No SSG. No npm. No tooling. Just simple HTML with partials imports, vanilla CSS, and whatever vanilla JS is necessary for enhancements.
I just want the HTML partials imports. Why don't we have them already?!
Actually, the main reason I feel uninspired to work on it (I haven't done so since I migrated to 11ty three years ago) is *because* of the tooling I need to use.
I don't want dependencies. I don't want tools with breaking updates. I just want a simple website. 🥹
@SaraSoueidan I started tweaking my website again last year after getting rid of all tooling except scss processor.
Granted, I don't have a fancy system nor difficult requirements.
But I feel like you, "modern" web development can be very complex.
@SaraSoueidan Apologies if you’re not looking for recommendations, and feel free to disregard, but if you haven’t tried CodeKit (Mac only) I heartily recommend it. I think it’ll do everything you’re looking for. I’ve loved it for years for saving me from tooling and config files.
Anyway, that’s all. Thanks for all the work you do for the community🙂
@andy_griffin_design @SaraSoueidan
How did that transition go for you? I'm starting to feel the same way.
@andy_griffin_design @SaraSoueidan
Yeah, I can see how that would be a real benefit for a UX designer, it's good to know. I'm glad it worked out well for you.
@SaraSoueidan @Marco This really makes me 🤯 because I migrated from Hugo to Eleventy and was delighted by the simplicity and direct control, not having to figure out Hugo's systems, and for now getting to mostly write plain HTML and CSS.
I believe your experience - I'm super curious what makes our experiences so different.
@SaraSoueidan @cvennevik @Marco I feel that too.
I only reach for some kind of framework when a project gets bigger than one page, because copying and pasting headers and footers etc is no good.
But oh how I wish it didn't need to be so complicated, and that getting over this one hurdle could be achieved while remaining much closer to the web platform.
@SaraSoueidan @cvennevik @Marco in this sense, SSI feels good, but it's still just on Apache servers. PHP also good.
But it does still feel like it should be available in HTML itself somehow!
I remember 'solving' it with a frameset or iframes in 1999+ for my teenaged creations - but that's really not ideal either.
@mattwilcox yeah - I mean that's why people like Hugo :)
I'm enjoying 11ty! But I crave simplicity - like, a craftsperson thing, wanting to work "with my hands" lol
@sarajw I know what you mean.
Honestly, one of the reasons I've not done anything on my own site in ... nearly a decade really... is the sheer "bleh" everytime I think about how *anything* will involve some nested levels of work I just can not be bothered with anymore.
The problem being; I also can't bring myself to put up with some off-the-shelf code / design output.
I'm aiming for super simplistic with 11ty, so I can just write markdown files.
@sarajw
Thinking about this a bit more, you could do this as a FUSE filesystem, where you mount a folder and it just resolves all your templates so next to all the, for example, .j2 files, there are the .html versions that it's magically created. Once that's setup, there's no tooling at all from your point of view - you just edit the .j2 files and have anything serve up the static .html versions, which are just there in the filesystem.
WebDevFS!
@SaraSoueidan @Marco Oh, that makes sense to me. I want that too. If I could replace Eleventy with an even simpler and more stable setup, I would.
I think it was the comparison to Hugo that threw me off - my experience was that Hugo was even worse for me in this regard.
@matthiasott is right! Kirby + Staticache Plugin might be everything you need and want, @SaraSoueidan ☺️
@matthiasott @SaraSoueidan @getkirby Still one of the best decisions we made. The entire project feels a lot more enjoyable to work with over a long time. I always hated that feeling of an invisible wall that I need to overcome when we want to change something. That feeling is totally gone.
The build step on deployment is completely optional. I don't think most personal projects need to think about it at all if you are not going too crazy with JS and CSS gimmicks.
@SaraSoueidan I was the same. Still early days for me but I’ve started a journey of learning and moving to Publii (double “I”).
Hope it’s inspirational and or helpful 👍
@westbrook @SaraSoueidan @justinfagnani
`<template src="...">` would be awesome :-)
@SaraSoueidan Going back to your original toot, I'm starting to wonder if you even need 11ty and Netlify. Sounds like what you want is old-fashioned Apache web hosting, where a bunch of files are just waiting for an HTTP request to arrive and are sent off to whatever browser needs them.
Then again, switching hosting providers is a serious challenge not to be taken on lightly.
@ppk @SaraSoueidan I think if the goal is simplicity and low-maintenance, adopting an internet-facing VM with Apache on it is perhaps not the ideal path. The constant need for security updates and reboots, not to mention the need to set the thing up securely enough in the first place. Even for someone with lots of skills, the fewer VMs one has, the better. Throwing something up on Netlify and walking away is really nice.
(I assume you need a VM? Does apache-only hosting still exist?)
@SaraSoueidan @ppk Yeah, server side includes on Apache are the only methods of doing this on the way you want that I’ve ever heard of.
We really need a native in-browser way to do it though that doesn’t rely on server config. Even if it’s not the most performant method.
@ppk I get that, but the alternative is Tooling of some sort. Yes Apache has been doing it for decades, but it requires that specific server software and configuration. It also means you local/dev has to match production. What if I want to whip up something for a local demo? I don’t want dockerise Apache just to have to do that :/
Extra request are not ideal (and maybe there isn’t an ideal solution to this issue), but it would be cool to have a built in system.
@mez If you want to make everything much more complicated than necessary ... you do you, I guess.
It's true that you have to maintain a second develop/test system with the same config as the remote production one, but that more or less goes for any project.
Local demo: every Mac comes with Apache pre-installed (though setting up SSI is pretty tricky here).
@ppk Do makes still come with Apache? I thought they’d dropped that but maybe it was only php?
I fail to see how browser supported html includes would make everything much more complicated. Would I use it in a performance-important client site? Probably not, same as CSS imports. Would I use it in a local-first site, or demo, or just prototype for myself while figuring stuff out, definitely! And the extra request cost would be tiny.
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