Writing HTML by hand is easier than debugging your static site generator – the logic grimoire
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As someone who has used a static site generator every day at work for years I am on the threshold of believing “actually just writing HTML by hand is probably easier”
This becomes obvious when you eg get a new work machine and need to set up the site generator on the new machine and realize that the exact series of bits you had on disk on the old machine were different than what you can achieve on the new machine. And as a result the site generator doesn’t work even though the setup is “the same”
This state of affairs is also known as “the mess we’re in”
Do you enjoy debugging programming language installations? What about the language’s package ecosystem? What about the language’s deployment model (or lack thereof)? Congratulations, you now get to be a sysadmin who has to care about all of these things. This is a mile high mountain of dependencies to be dealing with all just to avoid having to type a few brackets.
Meanwhile if a web site is maintained as just a folder of HTML files I could do a “git clone” and be up and running already in Emacs’ lovely nxml mode or for that matter tpope’s ragtag which I’ve also used extensively- and it’s excellent. Do autoformatting on save with xmlformat
To sum up, for long term ease of maintenance I’m coming to believe it’s wise to prefer static DATA that is maintained in a specified validated format over changing, dynamic CODE that keeps changing and breaking, and in all probability you don’t actually control it anyway, you just picked it up by the side of the road
(This grew out of a little complaint at https://mastodon.social/@rmloveland/112700265946114818)
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Author: logicgrimoire
I'm the author of 'Jelec: the White Bear, or, Beware an Encounter with a Raven and his Friends.' For my day job, I work as a technical writer at a software company.<br>View all posts by logicgrimoire
2 thoughts on “Writing HTML by hand is easier than debugging your static site generator”
Try 11ty. It’s flexible enough to do this. Very nicely designed.
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