Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by diggan » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 10:08 AM UTC

chrisldgk wrote: post #18

diggan wrote: post #10

> Traditional frameworks hydrate entire pages with JavaScript. Even if you've got a simple blog post with one interactive widget, the whole page gets the JavaScript treatment. Astro flips this on its head. Your pages are static HTML by default, and only the bits that need interactivity become JavaScript "islands." Back in my days we called this "progressive enhancements" (or even just "web pages"), and was basically…

I agree with that it’s not a new concept by itself, but the way it’s being done is much more elegant in my opinion. I originally started as a web developer during the time where PHP+jQuery was the state of the art for interactive webpages, shortly before React with SPAs became a thing. Looking back at it now, architecturally, the original approach was nicer, however DX used to be horrible at the time. Remember trying…

> Remember trying to debug with PHP on the frontend? I wouldn’t want to go back to that.

I do remember that, all too well. Countless hours spent with templates in Symfony, or dealing with Zend Framework and all that jazz...

But as far as I remember, the issue was debuggability and testing of the templates themselves, which was easily managed by moving functionality out of the templates (lots of people put lots of logic into templates...) and then putting that behavior under unit tests. Basically being better at enforcing proper MVC split was the way to solve that.

The DX wasn't horrible outside of that, even early 2010s which was when I was dealing with that for the first time.

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

#22

Post by ansc » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 10:14 AM UTC

>See that code fence at the top? That runs at build time, not in the browser. Your data fetching, your logic - it all happens before the user even loads the page.

I can't with this goddamn LLM blog posts, it just drowns everything.

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

#23

Post by ttoinou » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 10:14 AM UTC

I spent a small amount of time looking into Astro and I didn’t get the difference with the Fresh framework created by the Deno team.. ? Fresh does this Island architecture already, and benchmarks on Astro website dont include Deno+Fresh to compare. So I’m still wondering what’s the benefit of using Deno+Astro vs. Deno+Fresh

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

#24

Post by rckt » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 10:15 AM UTC

> I've found Astro perfect for marketing sites, blogs, e-commerce catalogues, and portfolio sites

Basically, not suitable for anything complex.

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

#25

Post by thibaultamartin » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 10:17 AM UTC

diggan wrote: post #17

thibaultamartin wrote: post #9

I can only approve. To me Astro started as "it's just html and css but with includes." I used it for my personal website, and recently used it when reimplementing the Matrix Conference website. It's really a no-fuss framework that is a joy to use. Among the things I love about Astro: - It's still html and css centric - Once built, it doesn't require js by default - You can still opt-into adding js for interactivity h…

> - It's still html and css centric - Once built, it doesn't require js by default - You can still opt-into adding js for interactivity here and there I've never used Astro so forgive my ignorance, but isn't that just creating a .html file, a .css file and then optionally provide a .js file? What does Astro give you in this case? You'd get the same experience with a directory of files + Notepad basically. It's also e…

Fair questions.

For the first one, the main benefits of Astro over static html and css (for my use cases) are the ability to include components and enforce the properties that must be passed. A typical example would be [here][0] where I define a layout for the whole website, and then [on each page that uses it](https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-conf-website/blob/main/...) I have to pass the right properties. Doable by hand, but it's great to have tooling that can yell at me if I forgot to do it.

Content Collections also let me grab content from e.g. markdown or json and build pages automatically from it. The [Content Collections docs][1] are fairly straightforward.

As for performance issues, I've spent quite a bit of time on the countryside where connectivity was an issue and every extra request was definitely noticeable, hence the value of inlining it (you load one html file that has the css embedded, instead of loading an html file that then tells your browser to load an extra css file). The same can be true in some malls where I live.

[0]: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-conf-website/blob/main/... [1]: https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/content-collections/

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

#26

Post by esseph » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 10:17 AM UTC

ansc wrote: post #22

>See that code fence at the top? That runs at build time, not in the browser. Your data fetching, your logic - it all happens before the user even loads the page. I can't with this goddamn LLM blog posts, it just drowns everything.

Some of us actually write like that... :/

Sucks when everything you write sounds like a bot because you're autistic.

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

#27

Post by falcor84 » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 10:19 AM UTC

ansc wrote: post #22

>See that code fence at the top? That runs at build time, not in the browser. Your data fetching, your logic - it all happens before the user even loads the page. I can't with this goddamn LLM blog posts, it just drowns everything.

What does this have to do with LLMs? Are you just uncomfortable with dashes?

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

#28

Post by sublinear » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 10:20 AM UTC

> When I say Astro sites are fast, I mean properly fast. We're talking 40% faster load times compared to traditional React frameworks.

That's a really low bar. Why not static pages? Why even use a framework at all if you're thinking of using Astro?

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

#29

Post by rasmus1610 » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 10:20 AM UTC

I recently build a website for a medical practice using Astro.

I was amazed by how easy it was compared to my experience with Wordpress for this several years ago.

And I can host it for free on something like Netlify and I don’t need to worry about the site being hacked, like with WP.

I even built a very simple git-based CMS so that the client can update the content themselves.

Web dev has really come a long way, despite what a lot of people say.

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

#30

Post by steve_taylor » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 10:25 AM UTC

diggan wrote: post #10

> Traditional frameworks hydrate entire pages with JavaScript. Even if you've got a simple blog post with one interactive widget, the whole page gets the JavaScript treatment. Astro flips this on its head. Your pages are static HTML by default, and only the bits that need interactivity become JavaScript "islands." Back in my days we called this "progressive enhancements" (or even just "web pages"), and was basically…

Back in your day, there wasn’t a developer experience by which you could build a website or web app (or both) as a single, cohesive unit, covering both front-end and back-end, while avoiding the hydration performance hit. Now we have Astro, Next.js with RSC, and probably at least a dozen more strong contenders.