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Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web

websmith.studio

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Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web

#131

Post by thinkindie »

What I don't understand from these conversation is the main selling proposition for Astro: if you have a content-heavy website, you should ship zero Javascript. And I agree with that, most of the websites heavy in content will at most have a couple of pages consumed in a single session.

But if my "website" is an application, Javascript makes the whole user experience better, if implemented well. It doesn't matter that the user will wait for 1 more second if they will have to spend the entire day working on it.

Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web

#132

Post by deltarholamda »

nchmy wrote: post #105
aswerty wrote: post #99

It's clear to me that the frontend conversation space is broken. Not even just the ecosystem being a mess. Boiling down the conversation I see in the article, it just seems to be: the browser as a HMI vs the browser as a an application runtime. Depending on what you want to do one might be a better fit than the other. But the points it puts forward are fluff arguments like "it's a breadth of fresh air" or "it loads f…

"Loads faster" is fluff? How so?

Write some straight HTML pages and serve it from bog standard Apache. Heck, get really fancy and do some server-side includes for your CSS or something.

It's really fast, you can edit it with Notepad, and you can probably saturate your bandwidth with a consumer level PC.

It's fluff because, well, our expectations are so unbelievably low. By the time you've bolted on every whizbang dingus leveraging four different languages (two of which are some flavor of Javascript), your twelve page site takes a couple of minutes to compile (what?), and it chokes your three load-balanced AWS compute nodes.

Web applications are hard. I get that. Web sites? They were, by design, incredibly simple. We make them complicated for often unclear reasons.

I appreciate what the Astro folks are trying to do, and it's very clever. But your basic Web site need not require freaking npm in order to "return to the fundamentals of the Web".

Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web

#133

Post by jadbox »

nchmy wrote: post #115
account-5 wrote: post #82

I this not similar to htmx?

Htmx is just a js library that helps with Ajax. Astro runs on your server to largely do static site generation, and also has htmx-like capabilities. I prefer htmx and, better yet, datastar as they're backend-agnostic.

Why do you prefer datastar vs htmx? Afaik htmx tends to allow progressive enhancement without JS, while datastar requires JS to work.

Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web

#135

Post by hasanhaja »

btbytes wrote: post #37
rckt wrote: post #24

> I've found Astro perfect for marketing sites, blogs, e-commerce catalogues, and portfolio sites Basically, not suitable for anything complex.

The number of web projects that fall into these categories vastly outnumber “complex” projects. For complex there is always WASM.

Yeah, this is my gut-feeling too! Because the alternative for "complex" being discussed is Next.js, but that doesn't really help you with "complex" applications, and you still have to bootstrap a lot of infrastructure yourself (with dependencies, or by yourself).

Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web

#136

Post by Y-bar »

abound wrote: post #73
pentagrama wrote: post #67

But it has a CMS? The author said that replaced WordPress sites with Astro, and on https://astro.build/ I see a comparison to WordPress. Astro brings a friendly UI to maintain and update the sites? Like the WordPress panel and editor.

Not sure if anything major has changed recently, but I think you bring your own CMS. I've used Astro successfully with Strapi, for example.

If they need to bring in a CMS to edit content and juggle assets they could have used Wordpress in headless mode, which the customer was already used to…

Eg. https://www.gatsbyjs.com/docs/glossary/headless-wordpress/

Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web

#137

Post by rustc »

kh_hk wrote: post #104
rustc wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> islands work until they don't Like when?

Setting `client:load` and `client:visible` for (svelte) islands you want to run on the client ends up inlining script type modules all around the html. It looked like a big hack to me. On the positive side their use of web components is a nice bet.

And does it break something? I was replying to "islands work until they don't".

Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web

#138

Post by aaronbaugher »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #51
esseph wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us actually write like that... :/ Sucks when everything you write sounds like a bot because you're autistic.

> Some of us actually write like that The fact that LLMs write like that is proof of that people write like this too, as LLMS produce statistical averages of the input writings.

It kind of surprises me that they never confuse "it's" and "its" and common mistakes like that, when it seems like most human writers today swap them randomly. I suppose that's thanks to a lot of the text in the training data predating the collapse of English education.

I'm not sure why em dashes are so popular, though. I don't think I've ever seen human writing that had as many em dashes as LLMs use.

Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web

#139

Post by nchmy »

jadbox wrote: post #133
nchmy wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Htmx is just a js library that helps with Ajax. Astro runs on your server to largely do static site generation, and also has htmx-like capabilities. I prefer htmx and, better yet, datastar as they're backend-agnostic.

Why do you prefer datastar vs htmx? Afaik htmx tends to allow progressive enhancement without JS, while datastar requires JS to work.

Htmx IS JavaScript...

Datastar does everything htmx does and much more. And, iirc, is also smaller. Just explore their site, docs, essays etc

Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web

#140

Post by sktrdie »

Next.js hydrates only client components - so effectively it's doing island architecture. And it's react end to end. How's that different from Astro? Stating things like "Components without the complexity" doesn't really mean anything unless you do some comparisons?
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