I've been maintaining my personal website as plain HTML for five years now. I must say, I quite like this method. There's no substitute for practice when it comes to maintaining your skills at editing HTML and CSS.
Yes, you must copy and paste content and not having layout page is annoying at times. But the overhead of just doing it yourself is surprisingly small in terms of the time commitment.
Typically, I'll draft a post in MS Word then open the git repo for my site, hosted on github pages, duplicate and rename the template.html page that includes the CSS, footer, and header for my site and then copy my content into it. When I'm happy with everything, I'll make my commit and then a minute later it's live at my custom domain. Seeing that it takes only 11KBs and 26ms to load my landing page strangely delightful.
> copy and paste content and not having layout page is annoying at times
HTML was envisioned as an SGML application/vocabulary, and SGML has those power features, such as type-checked shared fragments/text macros (entities, possibly with parameters), safe third-party content transclusion, markup stream processing and filtering for generating a table of content for page or site navigation, content screening for removal/rejection of undesired script in user content, expansion of custom Wiki syntax such as markdown into HTML, producing "views" for RSS or search result pages in pipelines, etc. etc. See [1] for a basic tutorial.
[1]: https://sgmljs.net/docs/producing-html-tutorial/producing-ht...
I didn't expect this to be serious and am surprised on that the tutorial actually delivers. Way back when I was learning HTML and it was said that it was built with SGML, then this relation remained a total mystery to me.
> Yes, you must copy and paste content and not having layout page is annoying at times. But the overhead of just doing it yourself is surprisingly small in terms of the time commitment.
This calls out for server side includes[0]. I so loved server side includes back in the late 90s. You still work in plain HTML and CSS, boilerplate can be centralized and not repeated, and clients receive the entire page in a single request.
> you must copy and paste content
I've started the Slab templating language[0] to be able to define reusable HTML fragments. It means using a dedicated tool but hopefully not needing to resort to a real programming language.
> Yes, you must copy and paste content and not having layout page is annoying at time
I think this was one of the most common usages of PHP in the beginning, at least for those who basically wrote static HTML/CSS and needed a header/footer. It was probably a gateway into more advanced dynamic pages, eventually ending up using databases and other advanced functionality.
<?php include('header.inc'); ?>
<p>Here's a list of my favourite movies</p>
<ul>
<li>...</li>
</ul>
<?php include('footer.inc'); ?>
> > Yes, you must copy and paste content and not having layout page is annoying at time
> I think this was one of the most common usages of PHP in the beginning,
> <?php include('header.inc'); ?>
And other tools beforehand: basic CGI or even more basic server-side includes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes)
To reduce CPU and IO load on the server (or just in circumstances where SSI was not enabled on the server they had available) some would pre-process the SSI directives (obviously this doesn't work for dynamic results such as the output from many #exec examples), so all that is being served is simple static files ‑ a precursor to more complex modern static site builders.
> It would be great if HTML had a similar capability. People have asked for it for over 30 years, so it's unlikely that it will be implemented now.
That doesn't really fit with the intentions of HTML, and could impose a bunch of extra network latency overhead compared to using SSI instead, leading to either complete rendering delays or jumpy pages as included content is merged in in steps, though I have seen it implemented multiple ways using a bit of JS (some significantly more janky than others).
This is my workflow for my site, too, just replacing MS Word with Obsidian since it syncs over all my devices allowing me to write/edit my future content wherever I am at, then upload later.
I tried things like bashblog for awhile, but it has some quirks like sometimes placing posts out of order when building the index page. That and I have zero use for the built in analytics options or things like Discus comments, so it seemed like I was really only using about 30% of what it was meant to do.
Here's a link to that for anyone interested. It's quite tweakable.
> Yes, you must copy and paste content
Many people who maintain their own sites in vanilla web technologies tend to create reusable functions to handle this for them. It can generate headers and the like dynamically so you don't have to change it on every single page. Though that does kill the "no javascript required" aspect a lot of people like
Of course you could simply add a build step to your pure HTML site instead!
I've adopted the idea that a blog post is archived when it's published; I don't want to tinker with it again. Old pages may have an old style, but that's OK, it's an archive. Copy/paste works great for this.
The only reason I use a blog engine now (Hugo) is for RSS. I kept messing up or forgetting manual RSS edits.
I really love this! I've seen it in action a couple times in the wild, and it's super cool seeing how the site's design has evolved over time.
It also has the benefit of forcing you to keep your URIs stable. Cool URIs don't change: https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html
Or, let me be cheeky: you could add some `<php include('header.html')?>` in your html.
I recently learned the object tag can do what I wished for in the 90s... work as an include tag:
<object data="footer.html"></object>
Should reduce a lot of boilerplate that would get out of sync on my next project, without need for templating.
Couldn't you sort of do that using server side includes back en the 90s? Assuming that your web server supported it.
Unfortunately that will require the client to make additional web requests to load the page, effectively doubling latency at a minimum.
A few extra <object> in a blog post is a worthwhile tradeoff, if you're literally using raw HTML.
- HTTP/1.1 (1997) already reuses connections, so it will not double latency. The DNS lookup and the TCP connection are a high fixed cost for the first .html request.
- HTTP/2 (2015) further reduces the cost of subsequent requests, with a bunch of techniques, like dictionary compression.
- You will likely still be 10x faster than a typical "modern" page with JavaScript, which has to load the JS first, and then execute it. The tradeoff has flipped now, where execution latency for JS / DOM reflows can be higher than network latency. So using raw HTML means you are already far ahead of the pack.
So say you have a 50 ms time for the initial .html request. Then adding some <object> might bring you to 55 ms, 60 ms, 80 ms, 100 ms.
But you would have to do something pretty bad to get to 300 ms or 1500 ms, which you can easily see on the modern web.
So yes go ahead and add those <object> tags, if it means you can get by with no toolchain. Personally I use Markdown and some custom Python scripts to generate the header and footer.
Sounds like premature optimization for a simple page. If the objects are sized their regions should be fillable afterward without need to resize and be cached for subsequent access.
The other solutions are even easier and don’t double latency.
> be cached for subsequent access.
So now you need to setup cache control?
> It can generate headers and the like dynamically so you don't have to change it on every single pa
Yeah, I noped out of that and use a client-side include (webcomponent) so that my html can have `<include-remote remote-src='....'>` instead.
Sure, it requires JS to be enabled for the webcomponent to work, but I'm fine with that.
See https://www.lelanthran.com for an example.
[EDIT: Dammit, my blog doesn't use that webcomponent anymore! Here's an actual production usage of it: https://demo.skillful-training.com/project/webroot/ (use usernames (one..ten)@example.com and password '1' if you want to see more usage of it)]
Isn't using React with a static site generator framework basically the same thing but better?
Then you'd have to learn React, and for many of us the point is that we really don't want to learn React, or other frontend frameworks.
Yes, if you want to throw up in your mouth.
In theory yes, in practice good luck maintaining that if you are just a solo blogger.
I doubt your blog would last a single month without some breaking change of some sort in one of the packages.
Yes, it is. Unfortunately HN has a crazy bias against JavaScript (the least crazy part of the web stack) and in favour of HTML and CSS, even though the latter are worse in every meaningful way.
I don't even know where to begin with the pretence that you can compare HTML with JS and somehow conclude that one is 'better' than the other. They are totally different things. JS is for functionality, and if you're using it to serve static content, you're not using it as designed.
I don't particularly care about "designed for". If you've got to serve something to make the browser display the static content you want it to, the least unpleasant way to do so is with JS.
> Yes, you must copy and paste content
Manual work is almost never a good solution. Try this:
for PAGE in *.page
do
cat header.html "$PAGE" footer.html > “$PAGE.html”
doneA slightly simpler version of same is:
for PAGE in *.page
do
cat header.html "$PAGE" footer.html > "$PAGE.html"
done
HTH
EDIT: if you don't want the output file to be named "a.page.html" and instead it to be "a.html", replace the above cat invocation with:
cat header.html "$PAGE" footer.html > "${PAGE%.page}.html"
0 - https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=cat&apropos=0&sekt...
Why not use server side includes? Most web servers support it, and it dates back to one of the early features of webservers.
<!--# set var="pagetitle" value="Main page" -->
<!--# include file="00__header.html" -->
... main content here
<!--# include file="00__footer.html" -->Because that requires a server with the proper config and this is an HTML file. So it works in every environment, like locally on your machine, or GitHub pages.
`cat` supports multiple files, no? The whole point is that it concatenates. Why use 3 commands?
Because I’m typing on my phone and the line was long. Thanks!
Oh man, cattiness use of cat!
Unfortunately, this doesn't adjust the <title> element.
How do you do for syntax highlighting ?
use esbuild to get rid of copy-pasting
There's a lot you can do with just plain html these days if you just need a clean site. Here's an example from my recipe site (https://xilic.com/recipia/sauces/pesto_traditional.html), mostly for my personal use or sharing with friends, with only html/css. It has expandable boxes, a menu system, etc. A simple script converts a directory structure of .csv files to these recipe cards with a template, and this way you can edit the sources in a spreadsheet and then the publish script just takes whatever is new and re-does the whole lot of html as necessary. Just like we used to do with Apache Forest!
Really appreciate that you're doing mass-based recipes, and in metric too. I'm tired of all the American recipes with quantities like "2 1/3 cups"; the proliferation of units and fractions makes work needlessly hard compared to just grams and millilitres.
Furthermore, when it comes to recipes for baking, if it's not using weight as a measure, then it's wrong. Baking is chemistry, so if you want consistent controlled results, stop measuring anything by volume.
Sorry, pet peeve of mine as a hobby baker.
What a beautiful website ! Feels carefully crafted, full of nice moments like the > turning the a - when sections are open in the TOC. Would love to hear more detail on how you went about making it. Did you ever consider sharing parts of the source code ?
I am falling back to 'plain and simple' in the world of web applications (or a website)
While I am a programmer, I will continue to write code that injects html text with another... like a layout having a title and body html, etc.
I certianly limit my client-side codebase. Most of my javascript code is really focused on GUI/UI, even if I have to use a specific library. I dont bother with React or the like.
I will use htmx if I want to do partial updates. Other pages might be a tad more complicated if fetching data from SQL. However, I also have pages that are SIMPLY HTML+CSS!!
As I say - plain and simple.
Did he reinvent a static-site generator? Markdown, pandoc, makefile... Sounds like a job for hugo/eleventy/jekyll/whatever.
Did they reinvent or did they learn stuff? Maybe both.
I don't maintain a blog so my opinion may not count for much, but I feel like if what you are trying to do doesn't fit neatly into an SSG's existing templates/themes, it may in fact be easier just to use pandoc and some simple tooling around it. Certainly when I looked into a few SSGs for the purpose of making a simple personal website (without a blog) I found I would spend more time trying to bend them to my will than just writing what I want in markdown and running pandoc on it.
Its the the first time someone has reinvented a static site generator...
Looks around sheepishly
I've tried Hugo and Jekyll a few times and they are pretty complicated. If you just want to post something online every now and then, then it might be easier to just to HTML.
Another way of looking at it is that Hugo, eleventy, etc. are reinventions of pandoc, makefile etc. The latter things came first!
I would rather say that the former group are wrappers around the latter group. Using an SSG doesn't just mean converting Markdown etc. source and orchestrating a build process of some sort, but also filling in templates and providing useful build steps to orchestrate (such as generating additional pages that reference the actual article content: archives, collections grouped by tags or categories, etc.). They also generally implement things like the live reloading that the author mentioned as missing.
I'm currently using Nikola and have done quite a bit of customization - by hacking around and learning modern web stuff as I go (the last time I did this stuff seriously, jQuery was dominant and Bootstrap was brand new - of course I'm not writing a bunch of JavaScript for a blog, but that also presumably dates my understanding of HTML and CSS). I've found that even though there's way more stuff in here than I really want, it's really nice to have that kind of scaffolding to start, and I can strip it away as I customize.
In my opinion, Jekyll is easier and more capable than Pandoc and markdown files for a HTML/CSS website.
Jekyll also has a higher ceiling than Pandoc when you need a templating language, plugins, etc.
Yeah, obviously this is literally what something like Jekyll or Hugo does. It's just (at least to me) a simpler version of that where you can fully see what's happening. Also I didn't want all the theme-ing overhead that comes with those - just something I could inject into my existing site.
>Also I didn't want all the theme-ing overhead that comes with those - just something I could inject into my existing site.
I didn't like how complex that stuff is with Nikola - I didn't have an obvious entry point for making the kinds of customizations I really wanted, and yet there was still so much to look at in order to understand the system. But at the same time I really didn't want to spend hours re-learning CSS more or less from scratch, when I could actually use the examples already in the existing themes.
I did something really awful: instead of trying to make yet another layer of theme "extension", I copied everything locally and have been condensing it as I go.
This had the benefit that I didn't have to decide on a bunch of CSS classes up front in order to have anything look passable. There may be tons of unused stuff, but I'm cleaning that up as I implement my own things - and bit by bit, I get something smaller and more comprehensible that fits my mental models. This conversion process might not be any faster, but I'm certainly enjoying myself more.
At some point in the future I'm considering doing a simple templating engine and converting these templates (originally Mako) to it. It just irritates me that I still have to deal with close tags - both in HTML and in template directives - when I'm doing everything in Python. I have a vague memory of a 2010-era JavaScript templating system - I think it was called Express or something like that? - which used indent-based syntax without closing tags. So I'm inspired by my recollection of that.
Good on ya! HTML+JS is plenty performant for a blog and I'm always happy to see more people eschewing frameworks when they're not necessary.
I've been writing a progressive web app that is, itself, a "web component" (custom element), built entirely with custom elements, so I feel like I've got a pretty good idea of how you can tackle that header reuse bullet point. Happy to give pointers if you're interested in that at all.
Anyway, great job on simplifying things! I hope it gets easier from here!
Hugo worked for me. And as part of the GitHub pipeline that builds the site and deploys it I can grab some ‘dynamic’ content (from a Notion DB) and render it. Subsequently I added Zapier so that when the Notion DB changes it triggers the pipeline to update my website. The only thing I pay for is the web hosting with dreamhost.
https://www.planetjones.net/blog/03-05-2023/relaunching-my-p...
In 1995, I started with a personal website based on HTML. Since then, I have added a little bit of CSS to the home page, but all the other files are in plain HTML. For that reason it looks very old school, but that is okay with me.
I have been adding some JavaScript through the years. Some for generating content, some for graphics and animations. I also have written a C program for checking the HTML and all the internal links and the use of tags. The program places all updated files into a folder ready for upload with FTP.
To edit the HTML, I use an editor (based on Crystal Edit) that also can navigate HTML files: when pressing F5 on a link, it opens the file in the editor (or in the default browser when it is an external link), and if there a tag in the link, positions the cursor at that line.
See for more details: https://www.iwriteiam.nl/SiteMain.html
I started a portfolio website with Netlify (iirc), then I moved to Vue + Gridsome (on GitHub pages), then Next.js with Tailwind CSS, and was about to move to Vite.js over winter break.
That's 4 stacks over the course of 5-6 years. Not worth it.
Decided to do the sensible thing and use GitHub's README functionality. I prefer this approach and wish more folks in the tech community adopted it: https://github.com/SuboptimalEng
This is an interesting idea! Honestly I didn't even know Github had a per-user readme until you mentioned it
IMO there's quite a surprising amount of stuff you can do on GitHub that's highly undiscoverable. You only think of it when you see someone else on the site doing it, and then you don't necessarily know what it's called so you don't know how to research it.
I hate the UI layer, for this reason. Nothing is ever stable. I'm looking for "Boring" and "Googleable in the age of AI slop". The other alternative are frameworks small enough to easily comprehend.
The UI is often tangential to the heavy lifting done by the back end. It often needs to be "just good enough".
Don’t hate the layer, hate the player.
How can UI be stable if you’re the one changing it all the time even if all you need is a readme page that can be done in the same UI with no change for decades?
GitHub was just down the other day. Why would you want your personal website/portfolio to be tied to GitHub? Crazy "modern web dev" stacks are likely overkill, but that's not an argument against self-hosting.
Because it's free and convenient, and other hosting providers don't magically have 100% uptime either. Not even necessarily more uptime than GitHub.
How is it "tied"? You still have a local repo that you could deploy somewhere else.
Personal websites can be down a few days a month without a problem.
+1. Not like my $5 hosting plan has less downtime than Github. Well... maybe? Fewer moving parts perhaps. But it's not immune.
sounds like a self-inflicted problem really. Why do you even change stack that much if what you want is a simple functionality?
I have found someone who uses the anchor suffix to solve the problem:
https://john-doe.neocities.org/
I am not html expert, so I have no idea how complicate or what implications would that have.
This is quite neat. Every page is a <section id="pageid"> and css is
section {display:none}
section:target {display:block}
I would also make it so the url was example.com/#/pageid, so the id is "/pageid". Looks a bit better I think.
I love this site and concept and have been thinking about moving to this method for my own site
Same. This would work really well for my site, I think, although I worry slightly about latency as it scales and I add more and more photos. That is not so much a problem right now, but it might impose some latency later.
> My project tree got a lot simpler and the only Javascript on the site now is to highlight code.
You can do away with the JS with something like Pandoc Highlight Filter: https://gitlab.com/danbarry16/pandoc-highlight-filter
Just take the Python file, make it executable and add it to the filter arguments. It's very basic, but all done during build time. It was originally started to build out HTML documentation for a system that was very particular about what types of files could be used.
It can also do other stuff like build your site with Python blocks that are run: https://gitlab.com/danbarry16/pandoc-highlight-filter/-/blob...
A few years ago, me and a coworker redid our company's website in straight-up HTML, JS, and CSS without a framework. It was quite refreshing but it certainly took longer to complete it all. It had 3D models and some scroll-based masking on videos and such.
It has sadly been replaced by a website made in Framer due to time constraints, but the old version is on the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20211008131609/https://tonari.no...
Unfortunately it kinda turned into a flickery mess, not sure if that's an old bug of ours or something failing to load properly from the archive. Oh well!
I'm surprised to not see Astro mentioned, its whole schtick is providing very similar DX to frameworks like SvelteKit except in a way that's geared towards generating plain HTML/CSS with zero JS by default. You get things like components with scoped styles but they are compiled down to nothing. It's really a breath of fresh air.
Once I randomly discovered Astro, I couldn't go back.
I love that you can even drop in Svelte and React blocks right next to each other, so you basically the power of all the advanced frameworks, and the choice to pare it down to a barebones html static site
Yeah I really like Astro too, I often just start with the minimal template [1] that is just a couple of files. I used to do many experiments with custom SSG some time ago but since Astro came out I can't change back anymore.
If you don't want js on the frontend you can just use it as a nice html templating engine. It also renders markdown automatically for you as it recognizes different formats by the file extension.
[1]: https://github.com/withastro/astro/tree/main/examples/minima...
Yep -- I rewrote my blog over new year's with Astro and am pretty happy w easy markdown and a bundle size of zero bytes.
Astro is my favorite tool for static sites these days. It's wonderful.
With regard to templating approaches, my favorite by a very wide margin is to simply use string interpolation in the base language.
You create a common template type with methods like:
LayoutHtml(Session? Session, string title, string innerHtml, ...) => $@"
<html>
(common elements)
{innerHtml}
(common elements)
</html>";
It looks like PHP is ideal.
I write my website and blog directly and entirely in HTML using BBEdit. For me, this is just much easier than any other method. I don't have to rely on any external system.
Same here. Any text editor would work, of course, but I like BBEdit because of all the customization options. I’ve set up a bunch of shortcuts for frequently used tags; after some practice, I’ve become able to write prose in HTML almost as smoothly as in a word processor.
When I redid my ancient personal site—started in the late 1990s—to make it mobile-friendly a few years ago, BBEdit was also useful when making changes across dozens of files at once.
And does your blog have RSS or Atom feed? That's usually where it becomes a little tedious.
Of course. It's not a blog without RSS!
Believe it or not, I also manually edit that in BBEdit.
You just need a build system in place - generating RSS from your collection of html files isn't difficult.
Funny how things like ESI/SSI would make such pages very easy to prepare and serve, but we switched to whole V8 engine to render HTML from almost-HTML syntax :)
I'm using PHP includes and don't think I have any JS besides Matomo tracking. I just read that I can use <object> for those includes now, so I can drop another layer of complexity.
The only thing I have is a blog post navigator, that shows you all blog posts besides the current one.
> More code duplication. SvelteKit has a component system so I could make my navigation bar as a component and reuse it.
I'm no front-end developer by any means, but arent native web components a thing now ?
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_compone...
I also decided to develop my personal website in plain HTML. I looked into a bunch of static site generators and found that direction to be too complicated and slow for me.
I still wanted the ability to have a common headers and footers and unique sections without repeating myself in every file. So I created a very small PHP application (just 5 files) and each page or blog post is a single PHP file in a directory. These PHP files have a small bit of metadata code at the top but are otherwise just plain HTML files. In each directory is layout file that wraps the content and these nest up the directory structure. So my site has a common header and footer and each section has their own subheader.
With the ability to publish by git push to the server, writing a blog post is as easy as creating a new file, git commit, and git push.
If you OK using a tiny tad JavaScript, it should be able to re-write that portion of the DOM to have HEADER and FOOTER common. Nonetheless, if you are also OK using Github, it has built-in setup where you blog in Plain-text (MarkDown) and things just works. You don't even need to build it on your local machine.
I wrote about it when I moved from WordPress to Jekyll. https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/
Before
> Why? It took me hours of Googling
After
> How? I spent some time looking around for guides or a “canonical” way of doing this and found that there isn’t really one.
Sounds like no benefit in reducing the costs to achieve a less functional site (see next steps, which would require more googling)
Why on earth would you use something like sveltekit in the first place for such a simple website?
I know people will say for the learning experience but learning what? How to basically "hello, world" in sveltekit?
why wouldn't one use sveltekit if they only have html and css? sveltekit compiles to a static site with a nice client-side router.
sveltekit is basically html + css in a .svelte file if you don't use javascript.
I took a similar approach, but I still have a dynamic site generator that reads my HTML content and outputs it to a template. I write all of my pages as stand-alone HTML, and each page can render on its own without any of the template being present. For example:
https://parkscomputing.com/page/conways-game-of-life
Is supported underneath by the raw HTML:
https://parkscomputing.com/content/conways-game-of-life.html
The menu and main page are controlled by a JSON configuration.
The site is slow right now because I'm being stingy on the Azure storage performance.
Hugo is also nice for this, and allows for markdown, embedding Mathjax or LaTeX, etc. Your minimal approach mirrors some of what I've seen in Hugo or Astro, and I'm all for it. I wish we had truly minimalist SSGs, I think the idea has a lot of purchase.
I decided to do write from scratch for my own site, and found that a real burden was maintaining lists of pages: there was no framework helping me out, and every time I added a new page I had to remember to go update my list of blog posts in the 2 or 3 pages I could access it from.
To solve that and other issues, like adding an rss feed and letting pages specify their own publish date, I did what anyone would do: write a custom web server. It's up at https://github.com/playtechnique/andrew/, if anyone wants to give it a whirl.
A few lines of PHP can solve that. The difference to other solutions is you don't have to compile/build/CI-CD it, just copy the PHP files in a folder, change a few things in the ini and you are ready to go.
For sure! PHP's a great language and tool! You'll still need a web server and modphp or something, and that web server was still probably compiled, but of course with bigger projects you can often get them from your distribution's package manager.
A little project like mine isn't the right answer for everyone; right now its only user is me. How it solves the problem fits my own little brain : )
That is exactly the setup I use for my website, but I need javascript for mathjax to compile latex. Some people told me I should do it "server-side", which I presume means precompile latex and serve the equations as inline images(?) but I haven't figured out how to do it. looks around
When I used to do interviews to frontend developers I often had them write a form with validation...in plain HTML and a sprinkle of js for some of the final validation touches.
Was kinda surprised at how many senior leetcode blackbelts didn't know HTML had built in validation :)
JS was required for some of the more complex validation logic and mounting few dom nodes (and again, surprisingly, many didn't know how to create an element and mount it!).
On the other hand I got to learn lots of nice tricks to complete some of the features (elements had to appear with conditional logic) with CSS only which was nice.
>Was kinda surprised at how many senior leetcode blackbelts didn't know HTML had built in validation :)
Judging by the websites I've had to deal with in the last few years, a lot of web devs don't know that HTML has built in form submission. Or that it's possible to, say, display images without JavaScript (looking squarely at you, Imgur).
HTML has built in validation, but the behavior and control over it is not great. I am using it in my projects to some extent, but it does not cover 100% of the needs. Because of that, some people skip it completely and almost forget it does exist.
What I like to do:
- have HTML files for the individual pages/posts (I like the freedom that custom HTML provides)
- have a script file consisting just of a single array of meta data blocks for the individual posts (headline, description, preview image(s), date, tags, additional assets to load, like additional CSS or JS, if required, restricted visibility, etc. – most of this is optional) and content for the preview
- a server-side template script that generates the chrome around an individual page view and a paginated list view from the feed data (this allows for things like pagination, cross-links, filters per tag, we can generate multiple views), and we can also generate a RRS feed from the feed-index. Moreover, as there is also no external input other than fragments from the request URI, which can be laundered easily (e.g., by discarding all non alpha-numeric characters) and checked for resolving to existing file paths in given constraints, this should be also considerably secure. (This is actually a rather short script.)
- a server config (`.htaccess` or similar) that parses parts of the request URL to parameters to be used by the template script.
(So, adding a post is as simple as adding a new HTML file, copying an entry in the feed file and modifying it accordingly for the new page. And it can be done all in a text editor. The only thing missing may be a full-text search, as there is no DB involved and no representation of the content as normalized plain text. On the other hand, this also keeps the server load low.)
Lots of people saying they did something similar, so I'll add that I also did something similar for learning / fun(?) with the added wrinkle that it runs on a raspberry pi at my house. I used golang's Fiber to serve the html/css. Fiber comes with some built-in templating as well to help with the layout. https://www.ianmyjer.com/content/homelab.md
I have a pretty elaborate Hakyll site with custom routers and all kinds of junk (https://dpitt.me), but it's an old site that started as Django, then I built it from scratch with Sinatra, and then was Jekyll for years. There really is something special about a well-organized static site. For all the rewrites of this old thing, I can't imagine moving away from static site generation.
What resource is good for gaining a deep and comprehensive knowledge of html for someone already familiar with html, like, having-written-Angular/JavaScript/jQuery-level familiar? Consider CSS to be out of scope of this question as it is a different beast on its own.
As others have said, you are reinventing the Static Site Generator. I would strongly urge you to look into those.
If you know Python well enough, my recommendation is Pelican.[1] You can author your posts in Markdown. You specify the desired HTML/CSS. It will then do all the boring work for you. Then just upload the static files to a webserver.
Nice job! If only HTML had a serious templating system(no the template tag isn’t enough) that could be used without JavaScript, we won’t need any 3rd party system for assembling static sites. For example a mechanism for including partials with the <link> tag and refer them inside a <template> or directly into current html
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/if...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/po...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes
Also, other than to satisfy a purist desire, why do you need this?
You can pre-render HTML quickly using a variety of template systems, and it would outperform what you are suggesting every time (from a client's perspective). I mean, think about the potential CSS resolution complexity, FOUC, etc.
In the 90s, we used Server Side Includes (SSI) for this. Probably still works.
One modern approach would be Caddy Server's templates, using Golang templating:
https://caddyserver.com/docs/modules/http.handlers.templates
The "include" function should do the job:
{{include "path/to/file.html"}}
httpd, nginx, a number of other servers support SSI
https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_ssi_module.html
Caddy chose not to, I guess?
https://caddy.community/t/caddy-update-on-ssi-server-side-in...
You generally can’t use SSI on many popular platforms for static websites like Netlify, etc.
However, you could generate the static HTML easily and then publish it on those platforms, which is what many people do today (probably not often using SSI).
(Chiming in because other people replying to you kept on the "iframe-like" part of the argument)
Or serializing `<template>`s without needing JS. Like in lists (`<ol>`, `<ul>`, `<dl>`...). All in all `<template>`s are a nice thing to have, and I do use them a lot (like in my own portfolio), but it feels really lacking without JS.
We've got frames and iframes...
You could use HTMX.org ;)
Does HTMX work without Javascript?
They wrote the javascript so you don't have to.
I mentioned the object tag elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42706227
I think PhpStorm/WebStorm has LiveReload built into it. It's been years since I've used it since I don't usually write plain HTML/CSS. But it was just a button click away IIRC. You shouldn't need to restart any servers no matter what you do anyway, just press F5. Still not hard.
I use PHP+Twig on my simple websites just so I don't have to copy-paste the header/footer/nav. It's still incredibly simple, very close to HTML+CSS and no build times. You can FTP upload your files if you want it works.
> It took me hours of Googling and trying out different options to come up with this awful piece of code that worked to load the contents of a file and give them to my page [CODE]
Do I have Stockholm syndrome or is the code here completely fine?
This whole piece kind of feels like the author just doesn't understand Svelte, so they threw it out and used something they do understand.
Yes, it probably is a good idea to use technologies you understand. But you not understanding Svelte isn't a Svelte problem.
> spending too much time on Hacker News gave me the misconception that writing a website using plain HTML and CSS would be a relatively well-paved path in 2025. I spent some time looking around for guides or a “canonical” way of doing this and found that there isn’t really one.
I had this exact same surprise last year! For whatever reason, there really isn't any sort of standard way of creating a vanilla site in 2025!
To contribute to the authors open questions at the bottom: for reusability, use web components [1] and for hot reload use a file watcher with a websocket, or just lean on your ide if possible (e.g. jetbrains).
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_compone...
I do mostly the same, .md and pandoc, but also mo for templating:
https://github.com/tests-always-included/mo.
Took just a few minutes to setup. E.g. https://afarah.info/public/blog/awsv3/index.html.
Writing in Markdown with {{mustache}} templates for DRY is very satisfying, a simple bash script renders it. Looks good on my phone even.
I did kinda the same thing. Not being a backend dev didn't stop me using some PHP, basically as template language. It has a few downsides as well, but overall I am happy with it.
Recently redesigned my site [1] and used nextjs app router (moved from page router).
The new paradigm of adding “use server”, “use cache”, and “use client” felt too magical by default.
Server actions are easy to forget adding validation and proper access control on. You need an external library to avoid the common pit falls.
I’ve been contemplating whether to move to something simple. The complexity creep is real.
I'm probably getting old, and I'm not a frontend dev, but your post makes no sense to me.
I looked at your site, and if that's anything more than a single static HTML file with some resources, served by a web server, something strange is going on. There is nothing complex on your site that requires more than a handful of lines of inline JS (to shuffle the letters).
The site also scrolls slowly, especially noticeable on phones. If this was just plain HTML it wouldn't.
It feels like the baseline for web developers has become that you MUST first add a ton of extremely complex dynamic stuff, and only then can you even think about putting a single line of text on the page. There's 200kB of code being loaded for this website, what is it doing?
Adding validation/access control to server actions is pretty much the same as for API endpoints though?
I'm not sure next.js is the right fit for a blog/personal site either, but that's an odd point imo.
Your site looks very nice though!
hello,
as always: imho.
ad "duplicated (html) code" in static webpages:
back in the 1990ties when a lot of people wrote html by hand, there was a thing called "server side includes" ...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes
or just use some "ubiquitous" script-language like php for this simple task of orchestrating/including snippets/components of code etc. :)
just my 0.02€
Writing your own static site generator is good for you. I'm using raw Jinja2 templates and a tiny python script to do my shared header/styles etc. Outside of that it's all shell scripts and raw HTML/CSS.
> the only Javascript on the site now is to highlight code
Couldn't the code highlighting be also handled statically during the build process?
You might find Teeny (https://github.com/yakkomajuri/teeny) interesting for this.
Something I built to have my own site in static HTML and CSS.
Love this. Building a website this way really teaches you why we started having all the complexities in web frameworks today. For certain simple websites like this one, the tradeoffs are worth it. I rebuilt our company website this way too. (Sescollc.com)
The best thing about this post to me was the screenshot of the directory organization. It’s the little things like this that making thinking “how to start” a matter of “where could I start”.
pandoc for the win. I use to convert my md resume into doc/pdf whatever.
Pandoc really looks like a nice tool
How is code syntax highlighting achieved in this context ?
Browser -> show source -> inspect element
You then see that it uses highlight.js
Thank you.
The CSS for this site (root.css) is beautifully simple! The colors, spacing, and fonts are very comfy - this is exactly the look I'd want for my blog.
FWIW I just import a canned CSS theme (Terminal CSS), MathJax, and the roll the rest in raw HTML;
it’s simple and maintainable.
There is a tool called entr, it kill and restart command when any file changes are detected, you could check it out.
This is exactly how I generate my site[^1]. Except I use a simple Node script to handle hosting a tiny HTTP server.
Node calls pandoc, which converts my markdown into HTML, ESBuild to convert the few JS snippets I run on my site (which I write in TS), and SASS to convert my scss stylesheet into a bundled CSS sheet.
It's super lightweight and I like that I can bend it to do whatever weird shit I want my site to have without relying on a 3rd party static site generator.
[^1]: https://pfy.ch
we need more of this. Thanks for sharing!!
Here's some of my tips for a handwritten HTML site, since the author wished more tips existed:
- consider using an HTML boilerplate template like this one if you don't know where to start: https://www.matuzo.at/blog/html-boilerplate/
- consider using a CSS template, or a CSS reset, if you don't know where to start with styling. Pico CSS is a good drop-in: https://picocss.com/. Frontend devs always blog about their CSS resets, like this one: https://piccalil.li/blog/a-more-modern-css-reset/. But if you're someone inclined to write their own HTML, then you'll probably also want to write your own CSS. This takes time to learn. Especially learning how to design the page without looking crappy
- I copy my last page as a template whenever writing a new page
- I don't worry about code duplication. If I need to refactor duplicated content, I use search and replace across files in vim (like https://nithinbekal.com/posts/vim-search-replace/). Hopefully your editor/IDE has something similar, and hopefully you're comfortable with regexes
- markdown + pandoc + scripting is a common solution. Technically it's not handwriting HTML at this point -- it's hacking together your own static site generator instead of using an existing framework -- but no biggie
- frontend people have made a lot of live reload tools over time. Here's a couple: https://nitoyon.github.io/livereloadx/ and https://github.com/tapio/live-server. Personally, I've cobbled together something with entr/caddy/websockets/userscripts. I've had problems with `python -m http.server` freezing up occasionally, but YMMV
- About RSS: you can generate your own feed if you already started your own generator script. Personally, I let this tool generate a feed for me in a GitHub Action: https://feed-me-up-scotty.vincenttunru.com/, but the feed quality is meh
- Expect to do a lot of fiddling. You'll reinvent things. You'll lack common features for a while. Embrace this as minimalism. You'll begin to appreciate the tasks that frameworks automate (image optimization, compression, meta tags, validation, etc)
- You'll face growing pains after you cross certain thresholds of page counts. Personally, I'd rather be grug-brained and edit more HTML than figure out some new framework. This is fine for a personal website with a straightforward structure
Plain HTML and CSS personal site experience can be vastly improved by using server side includes. Your webserver's SSI module is likely just the right amount of templating power so you don't have to re-write the same HTML in $x spots with a minimal attack surface and maintenance burden. SSI hasn't changed in 20 years and the nginx module at least hasn't even ever had a cve.
<!--# include file="/menu.html" -->
...
<!--# include file="/footer.html" -->
SSI's were my first foray into "backend," if you can even call it that, sometime around the year 2000. Some benevolent commenter on Slashdot gave me the tipoff, and my growing frustration with copy-pasting HTML snippets between pages was henceforth a thing of the past. Then came PHP, Python, et cetera, and the rest is history.
Amazing how such a simple mechanism can remain useful even decades later.
text is not json.