Sara SoueidanJul 11, 2024

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?!

Show threadSara SoueidanJul 11, 2024

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. 🥹

Show threadMarco ZeheJul 12, 2024
@SaraSoueidan Just a question out of curiosity, since I noticed the same when I migrated my blogs to eleventy, effectively archiving them: You ran your site on Hugo before. Was that any better in terms of user or developer experience? I remember you wrote a fantastic article about Hugo a few years ago. In fact it inspired me to play with Hugo back then.
Show threadSara SoueidanJul 12, 2024
@Marco Honestly, it's been three years so I barely remember. I do remember that 11ty had features I wanted that Hugo didn't have. But now that I crave simplicity again, I am tempted to look into migrating back to Hugo. Right now I'm waiting for a new laptop to replace my current one. Once it arrives and I record an update for a course chapter, i'll have more free time to experiment again. I'll let you know what I end up with!
Show threadCecilie 🧙‍♀️

@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.

Jul 12, 2024 at 6:14amWeb
Show threadSara SoueidanJul 12, 2024
@cvennevik @Marco But I didn't say 11ty is complex. I'm just yearning for even more simplicity. For just the absolute basics. For something that's easily portable and doesn't require any build steps.
Show threadSara Joy Jul 12, 2024

@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.

Show threadSara SoueidanJul 12, 2024
@sarajw @cvennevik @Marco YES! Exactly this 🥹
Show threadSara Joy Jul 12, 2024

@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.

Show threadMatt WilcoxJul 12, 2024
@sarajw @SaraSoueidan @cvennevik @Marco FWIW, SSI works on nGinx and Caddy too.
Show threadSara Joy Jul 12, 2024
@mattwilcox @SaraSoueidan @cvennevik @Marco ah! Thank you
Show threadMatt WilcoxJul 12, 2024
@sarajw (also FWIW, I sure don't like npm/node either, and would frankly rather have a single binary install file to run. I don't use node, so it's another abstraction to learn before you can use 11ty.)
Show threadSara Joy Jul 12, 2024

@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

Show threadSara Joy Jul 12, 2024
@mattwilcox (I know that there's a certain irony being that the web platform is itself many layers of abstraction above other stuff, bits and bytes and silicone, but eh)
Show threadMatt WilcoxJul 12, 2024

@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.

Show threadDuncan LockJul 12, 2024
@sarajw
I've sometimes wished that you could do "union files" at the filesystem level. Same class of filesystem tricks like symlinks and union mounts - but you'd say "my-unioned-file.html" is the union of header.html, body.html and footer.html. You'd only get complete files and not nestable partials, but it would disappear completely and magically have no tooling.
@SaraSoueidan @cvennevik @Marco
Show threadSara Joy Jul 12, 2024
@duncanlock @SaraSoueidan @cvennevik @Marco yessssss
Show threadDuncan LockJul 12, 2024

@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 @cvennevik @Marco

Show threadDuncan LockJul 12, 2024
@sarajw
You can write fuse filesystems in python no problem, but Jinja is probably too complex. SSI would be simpler and nginx already has the c code for this.
@SaraSoueidan @cvennevik @Marco
Show threadSara Joy Jul 12, 2024
@duncanlock @SaraSoueidan @cvennevik @Marco imma stick to simple 😅
Show threadCecilie 🧙‍♀️Jul 12, 2024

@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.