I recently discovered a static site generator called Astro, which supports many syntaxes but the .astro is a nice mix of TypeScript and JSX-like syntax. Content can use MDX which is like Markdown but with {JSX} style markup for variables and etc. The static components are used very similar to React, with familiar import statements and <ComponentName props=etc> patterns. It is extremely easy to pick up. Best of all, it has plugins to support all sorts of other interactivity, so you can create interactive 'islands' of content using React or Preact or SolidJS or Vue etc. That way you have most of your content statically generated, and then the dynamic parts can be done from the client side.
Best of all, if you use simple unchanged files for other dynamic stuff like JSON etc, you can just generate those on build and serve those files in the host directly as the 'response' to a simple REST request, which is sometimes overlooked despite being the most fundamental form of a REST API.
I came across this after researching various options for a website that had, mostly for my own entertainment, restrictions on wanting to be mostly statically generated but customizable easily without learning a lot of new syntax / etc, something JSX-like with Markdown support etc, and MDX was an immediate find - and astro was the easiest SSG I found for it after trying with 11ty and several others. Actually felt like a delight playing with it.
> if you use simple unchanged files for other dynamic stuff like JSON etc, you can just generate those on build and serve those files in the host directly
Other web frameworks support this too, if you look for "static export" options. Next.js, for example, supports this via the getInitialProps function.
What I like especially about Astro, that you perform this data loading during build time from any component/file on your page. With Next.js, this is only possible via the top level Page component.
Built a few reusable templates and JSON for storing game data (maybe not ideal at scale, but seems to be working for now). JavaScript, CSS, and MDX. Hosted on Netlify which is an 'Official Deployment Partner'. It's light and simple. So far has been a joy to work with.
>In the end, your document is now fully an HTML document, not a Markdown document that becomes an HTML document. It’s a minor perspective shift, but might have some cascading effects on things I’ve written above.
But this style of custom-elements requires successful javascript program execution to achieve that "HTML" document. Just like markdown requires some parser program to turn it in to HTML. It's not really fully an HTML document.
It's a good idea. It just would be a better one to write the custom-elements as wrappers for actual HTML elements. Like how https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/html-web-components-an-exa... shows instead of trying to do it SPA style and requiring perfect JS execution for anything to show properly.
HTML mark-up really isn't that heavy. The avoidance of it seems mostly to be because it's considered "old" and "old" is bad, or at least not useful on a resume. But it's old because it's so good it's stuck around for a long time. Only machine generated HTML is bulky. Hand written can be just as neat and readable as any Markdown.
JavaScript is one of the three core file types of the web. You can rely on it as much as HTML and CSS. I don't get the unique derision of JS compared to the other files types.
That's an understandable take in nearly all commercial and institutional contexts. But in others just involving human people, no. Many times JS does fail or isn't available. So building progressively enhanced web documents preserves utility across the spectrum of human visitors (and maintains accessibility). But if you only have a profit motive, then yes, there's no need for robust solutions. The amount of people that can't do JS well won't eat into profits or cause enough complaints to get you in trouble.
I think there are a group of people who are salty that js became “the lang” for the web. Another group of people loath the framework insanity of webdev. I count myself among the ladder not the former. I equally hate all languages.
Js is heavily overused but the “web” of today is not the web of the 90s or 2010s which some people cannot get over.
Custom elements are really great for editors and developers. You can provide a rich set of primitives that editors can use to display certain content. In the past, I used MDX [1] extensively so non-technical writers can create a rich UI for a documentation site.
I too ran a site on markdown with HTML. Originally I had my own hacky way of using HTML which was effectively to (1) replace all HTML with placeholder_number (2) format the markdown (3) replace placeholder_number with the html that used to be there. Not as simple as that but close.
Eventually i switched to a commonmark spec formatter and then tried to fix any old pages that had spaces in the HTML. Some were basically hard to fix like a pre section with code inside so I added some other hacks to do the same as above for those sections by surrounding them with {{#html}}....stuff..with...blank...lines{{/html}}.
So now my solution is handlebars.js meets markdown-it.
It certainly is a joy! I'd generalise it to any reasonable plaintext format.
Org mode keeps me locked in for this very reason.
No need for Emacs... pandoc (which I use) builds my static site. It supports enough Org markup to let me compile header metadata, latex, footnotes, markup etc. as well as inline live JavaScript code and use it in-page, just like I'd do in a regular stand-alone HTML page.
For example: a post with inlined static HTML and JavaScript, freely mixed-and-matched with org-native source block syntax. No plugins needed.
Github-rendered in repo (not github pages): It is (surprisingly) good enough for most Org content, including generating a nice Table of Contents... Except for any footnotes, and inlined or hosted JavaScript source (understandably, security may be a concern). https://github.com/adityaathalye/shite/blob/master/sources/p...
Readit News
Best of all, if you use simple unchanged files for other dynamic stuff like JSON etc, you can just generate those on build and serve those files in the host directly as the 'response' to a simple REST request, which is sometimes overlooked despite being the most fundamental form of a REST API.
https://astro.build/
I came across this after researching various options for a website that had, mostly for my own entertainment, restrictions on wanting to be mostly statically generated but customizable easily without learning a lot of new syntax / etc, something JSX-like with Markdown support etc, and MDX was an immediate find - and astro was the easiest SSG I found for it after trying with 11ty and several others. Actually felt like a delight playing with it.
Other web frameworks support this too, if you look for "static export" options. Next.js, for example, supports this via the getInitialProps function.
What I like especially about Astro, that you perform this data loading during build time from any component/file on your page. With Next.js, this is only possible via the top level Page component.
And if using app router model, that is part of React server components.
Built a few reusable templates and JSON for storing game data (maybe not ideal at scale, but seems to be working for now). JavaScript, CSS, and MDX. Hosted on Netlify which is an 'Official Deployment Partner'. It's light and simple. So far has been a joy to work with.
But this style of custom-elements requires successful javascript program execution to achieve that "HTML" document. Just like markdown requires some parser program to turn it in to HTML. It's not really fully an HTML document.
It's a good idea. It just would be a better one to write the custom-elements as wrappers for actual HTML elements. Like how https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/html-web-components-an-exa... shows instead of trying to do it SPA style and requiring perfect JS execution for anything to show properly.
HTML mark-up really isn't that heavy. The avoidance of it seems mostly to be because it's considered "old" and "old" is bad, or at least not useful on a resume. But it's old because it's so good it's stuck around for a long time. Only machine generated HTML is bulky. Hand written can be just as neat and readable as any Markdown.
pandoc has an extension for this:
https://pandoc.org/demo/example33/8.18-divs-and-spans.html
KeenWrite, my (R) Markdown editor, supports pandoc annotations:
https://youtu.be/7icc4oZB2I4?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9KWzP...
> Just like markdown requires some parser program to turn it in to HTML.
Or XHTML, which is XML, which can then be transformed into TeX macros, and then typeset into a PDF file with a theme (much like CSS stylizes HTML).
https://youtu.be/3QpX70O5S30?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9KWzP...
This allows separating content from presentation, allowing them to vary independently.
I think there are a group of people who are salty that js became “the lang” for the web. Another group of people loath the framework insanity of webdev. I count myself among the ladder not the former. I equally hate all languages.
Js is heavily overused but the “web” of today is not the web of the 90s or 2010s which some people cannot get over.
- [1] https://mdxjs.com/
MDX is great and I like to use it.
https://stripe.com/blog/markdoc
I wrote quite a bit about Fluid, which is the C# implementation of Liquid. https://deanebarker.net/tech/fluid/
It's in #6 and #7
https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#html-blocks
I too ran a site on markdown with HTML. Originally I had my own hacky way of using HTML which was effectively to (1) replace all HTML with placeholder_number (2) format the markdown (3) replace placeholder_number with the html that used to be there. Not as simple as that but close.
Eventually i switched to a commonmark spec formatter and then tried to fix any old pages that had spaces in the HTML. Some were basically hard to fix like a pre section with code inside so I added some other hacks to do the same as above for those sections by surrounding them with {{#html}}....stuff..with...blank...lines{{/html}}.
So now my solution is handlebars.js meets markdown-it.
Org mode keeps me locked in for this very reason.
No need for Emacs... pandoc (which I use) builds my static site. It supports enough Org markup to let me compile header metadata, latex, footnotes, markup etc. as well as inline live JavaScript code and use it in-page, just like I'd do in a regular stand-alone HTML page.
For example: a post with inlined static HTML and JavaScript, freely mixed-and-matched with org-native source block syntax. No plugins needed.
Raw: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/adityaathalye/shite/refs/h...
Pandoc-rendered live site: Compare Raw source with this section: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/animate-text-art-javascript/...
Github-rendered in repo (not github pages): It is (surprisingly) good enough for most Org content, including generating a nice Table of Contents... Except for any footnotes, and inlined or hosted JavaScript source (understandably, security may be a concern). https://github.com/adityaathalye/shite/blob/master/sources/p...
(I swear, I have never tried to do something this foolish… I swear…)..."
I will say, that almost didn't make me laugh, bur, I will not swear.
I've recently come off from one such rabbit hole - A CLI tool for Pre-processing vue project templates. It was over-engineered.
Will probably go back to re-build it when I get the free time.
└── Dey well; Be well