Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean by complex?
More than a blog or a simple static website.
Like what specifically? And why do you think Astro is not a good fit for it?
Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web
251–260 of 268 posts
Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web
#252I do not want to go anywhere near "fundamentals of web." E.g. html forms are such a badly designed mess, just look at checkbox form field.
But don't you need to need to understand the platform you're building on, warts and all?
How else can you fully grasp what's possible on that platform and the costs of different abstractions?
Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web
#253I ported my personal website from Jekyll to Astro a few weeks back and I really liked it. Astro is much easier to build and extend for me (and that is a personal preference point - I (and by I mostly mean claude) - and it's cool to add react components in to create more interactive points (but I haven't deployed that element yet). Speed is probably the same as jekyll - but relative to my react vite and nextjs apps it…
Do you have an intuition of when something becomes hefty and complicated, and would require a full stack solution like Next.js?
I do not but I think I'm growing one!
Potentially the heuristics would be about the level of user state management - e.g. if you're needing to do various workflows vs just presenting content.
Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web
#254I do not want to go anywhere near "fundamentals of web." E.g. html forms are such a badly designed mess, just look at checkbox form field.
But don't you need to need to understand the platform you're building on, warts and all? How else can you fully grasp what's possible on that platform and the costs of different abstractions?
I don't think so. If your framework is high level enough, you've successfully outsourced the bad stuff to someone else.
Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - 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…
> 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 even more optimized for speed, since there is no overhead/bloat at all, including at dev-time, just pure files, sent over HTTP. Astro is super for com…
So Astro is basically a (what we used to call) "static site generator" in that case? Something that existed for decades, and is basically just "compiling" templates, which could be in various syntaxes and languages, but in this case it's for JavaScript specifically. I guess the "what's old is new" point continues to stand tall :)
Again I'm failing to see exactly what Astro is "innovating" (as you and others claim they're doing). It's nothing wrong with taking a workflow and making it really stable/solid, or making it really fast, or similar. But for the claim to be "innovative" to be true, they actually have to do something new, or at least put together stuff in a new way :)
Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Traditional frameworks hydrate Dear God. In 20 years people will hire HTML experts as if they are COBOL experts today.
I look forward to that day, because it implies something better would have replaced it.
> because it implies something better would have replaced it
Hah, if only... Time and time again the ecosystem moves not to something that is better, but "same but different" or also commonly "kind of same but worse".
There are so many cases where the "worse" solution "won", and there is a reason "worse is better" is such a popular mantra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 even more optimized for speed, since there is no overhead/bloat at all, including at dev-time, just pure files, sent over HTTP. Astro is super for com…
So Astro is basically a (what we used to call) "static site generator" in that case? Something that existed for decades, and is basically just "compiling" templates, which could be in various syntaxes and languages, but in this case it's for JavaScript specifically. I guess the "what's old is new" point continues to stand tall :) Again I'm failing to see exactly what Astro is "innovating" (as you and others claim the…
I am not saying Astro is innovative and I don’t think I implied that in my reply. I don’t view Astro as innovative and I don’t understand people who view it like that because of, say, its islands. (We knew about islands before Astro.)
As you said, in the example I shared Astro is an SSG. It happens to use server-side JS but this is is irrelevant.
But it is more than that. Astro is an SSG and it is also a *very well made* SSG.
I have used all the usual suspects: Ruby ones, Go ones, Python ones, JS ones. The closest I came to having fun was 11ty, but 11ty is a bit too chaotic for me. Astro is the one that clicked. And the one that was fun to use right from day 1.
I am not a JavaScript person, mind you. JavaScript is not my strongest FE skill. The JS conventions, tricks, and syntaxes of modern FE frameworks, even less so.
So Astro did not click for me because of that. It clicked because of how well it is made and because of how fun it is to use.
Oh! It does this!
Oh! It does that!
Oh! It gives you type safety for your Markdown meta! (What?!)
Oh! It gives you out of the box this optimization I was putting together manually! You just have to say thisOptim: true in the configuration file!
Astro is a very well made tool that improves continually and that aligns with my vision of the platform and of how we should make stuff for the platform.
Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't, which is why all these solutions breakdown long-term compared to things like WP for small biz brochure stuff. 5 to 10 years from now when you're no longer talking to your client who has absolutely no technical experience, they're not gonna know that their website code is in some random GitHub repository that needs to be compiled with vite and then you need to magically wait for Netlify/etc to pull in your…
For a small business that simply displays an informational site, but occasionally needs to add content, a post on a blog or a change in the text or similar, it is sufficient to build a simple infrastructure of reading some markdown files and let them SFTP some markdown files and have periodic backups. One could also go as far as automatically committing those user uploaded files to a repo. None of which is difficult…
> let them SFTP some markdown files
Have you ever worked with any SMBs before? This is at least 5 technical levels above their head. Would make as much sense as telling them, "just use this CLI tool".
We're talking about people who will email you from their phone that the website is down, but it turns out it's just their home internet that is down.
Or think that the website disappeared from the internet. When in reality it's now the #2 result in google and they never knew they you could type a URL directly into the browser.
Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just did a search for "wordpress hosting" and picked one of the first results without shopping around, and the (clearly overpriced) plan I saw was $9.99/mo. In ten years that'd be $1200. A WP deployment on a simple shared hosting plan like that could run itself without needed a dev or sysadmin.
And then come the WP plugin license fees, which easily quadrupel that cost, if not more. Just the other day I have seen a WP instance, that has >50 plugins installed, some of which cost 800 Euro per year. They are lock-in traps for hapless marketing and other non-technical people, who are convinced that they definitely need this super-duper plugin. And then come the legal fees for making the site actually conforming…
Well we have hosted 10 small business WP sites per $10 DigitalOcean droplet for the last decade. There are not additional plugin costs on any of them. And there has been no real maintenance needed.
I'm not saying WP is great. Taking over a WP project from someone else can be daunting in tech debt and weird choices. But in terms of having a simple brochure website for businesses that get < 10k weekly visitors, it's pretty quick, cheap, and easy.
Re: Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just did a search for "wordpress hosting" and picked one of the first results without shopping around, and the (clearly overpriced) plan I saw was $9.99/mo. In ten years that'd be $1200. A WP deployment on a simple shared hosting plan like that could run itself without needed a dev or sysadmin.
> A WP deployment on a simple shared hosting plan like that could run itself without needed a dev or sysadmin Maybe in some cases but that hasn't been my experience at all (or the experience of all the devs I know IRL). Just a couple of weeks ago one of my clients installed a plugin which didn't allow users to log in.
Well a good step is to never give your clients full admin permissions in WP so that they can install plugins or mess with theme files.