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 🧙‍♀️Jul 12, 2024

@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.

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 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 
@duncanlock @SaraSoueidan @cvennevik @Marco imma stick to simple 😅
Jul 12, 2024 at 3:35pmWeb