The Static Site Paradox
kristoff.it
The Static Site Paradox
1–10 of 370 posts
Re: The Static Site Paradox
#2There is still not a censuses as to the definition of a static website. Is a website without a MYSQL database still static if it has JavaScript or php template include files? A pure static website in which each page has to be manually edited would be a headache.
Re: The Static Site Paradox
#3There is still not a censuses as to the definition of a static website. Is a website without a MYSQL database still static if it has JavaScript or php template include files? A pure static website in which each page has to be manually edited would be a headache.
IME, the closest definition is simply a site containing flat files only. No server-side scripting, but client-side JavaScript very much allowed. That doesn't necessarily mean 'manually editing' each page, although some writing probably has to be done at some point, unless you're outsourcing that to an LLM...
Re: The Static Site Paradox
#4> normal users are stuck with a bunch of greedy clowns that make them pay for every little thing
Huh? You're not confined to Automattic or WP-Engine, there are tons and tons of regular web hosting providers with Wordpress and a bunch of other stuff included in a standard hosting package, you can use the free Wordpress, and you can self-host. That's the whole point of Wordpress being open source, and it's working as intended.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with the status quo around blogging.
Static site generators are used by technologists who want to tinker and check all the boxes in whatever Chrome's latest devtool benchmark tool is called. Which is fine too, good for you if that's what you like to do with your time! For "normies" (or SME's who just want to publish their web content and move on), there are more than enough options around.
Re: The Static Site Paradox
#5Great article.
> Don't you find it infuriating when lawyers and accountants fail to clarify how their respective domains work, making them unavoidable intermediaries of systems that in theory you should be able to navigate by yourself?
> Whenever we fail to make simple things easy in software engineering, and webdev especially, we are failing society in the exact same way.
Exactly right.
Re: The Static Site Paradox
#6There is still not a censuses as to the definition of a static website. Is a website without a MYSQL database still static if it has JavaScript or php template include files? A pure static website in which each page has to be manually edited would be a headache.
Surely a static web site is one that could be downloaded with something like wget or curl and would still work by browsing the files directly from the file system without needing an actual web server?
Re: The Static Site Paradox
#7> Find an SSG (or handcraft everything yourself)
I think this came a bit too late? Astro solves this well, there are other solutions too. From startups building webflow-like SSG platforms to frameworks like astro that requires basic markdown and html.
Re: The Static Site Paradox
#8There is still not a censuses as to the definition of a static website. Is a website without a MYSQL database still static if it has JavaScript or php template include files? A pure static website in which each page has to be manually edited would be a headache.
Here's me waffling about this question for about four paragraphs, copied below for your reading pleasure :p :) (source: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/shite-the-static-sites-from-... )
> What is a static website?
> Static simply means as-is. Its inverse is "dynamic", meaning in-transit. The "static" part of "static website" corresponds to stored information. The "website" part corresponds to where from and how, the information gets to one's computer. A web-site is literally a place (site) on the World Wide Web, whence our computer has to fetch the information we want.
> Fetching information, such as a web page, over the Internet is "dynamic" by definition. Even just opening a file on your own computer's disk is "dynamic". The very act of reading a digital file, and/or transmitting it, means copying its bits from one place and showing them in another place 3.
> The Ultimate Static Site, is a file that once written never changes. Thus, once-received we never have to fetch it again (unless we lose it). Reality is of course not so simple. But we will work with the "static means never changing" mental model, because we can go pretty far with just that.
Re: The Static Site Paradox
#9There is still not a censuses as to the definition of a static website. Is a website without a MYSQL database still static if it has JavaScript or php template include files? A pure static website in which each page has to be manually edited would be a headache.
IMO, the pages can be compiled statically on a static website, so the HTML doesn't need to be manually edited for each page. But yeah, I guess there are degrees of staticness. My (brand new) personal website is literally all written from scratch right now, but soon it will probably be pregenerated from Markdown sources. I would still call that static, but to a lesser degree.
Re: The Static Site Paradox
#10There is still not a censuses as to the definition of a static website. Is a website without a MYSQL database still static if it has JavaScript or php template include files? A pure static website in which each page has to be manually edited would be a headache.
IME, the closest definition is simply a site containing flat files only. No server-side scripting, but client-side JavaScript very much allowed. That doesn't necessarily mean 'manually editing' each page, although some writing probably has to be done at some point, unless you're outsourcing that to an LLM...
What about fully client-rendered templates/sites that require JS for visualization? (ie, no graceful degradation at all).
Technically static, but absolutely of the worst kind in my opinion.