[1]Loris Cro

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The Static Site Paradox

October 08, 2024 • 3 min read • by Loris Cro

In front of you are two personal websites, each used as a blog and to display
basic contact info of the owner:

 1. One is a complex CMS written in PHP that requires a web server, multiple
    workers, a Redis cache, and a SQL database. The site also has a big
    frontend component that loads as a Single Page Application and then
    performs navigation by requesting the content in JSON form, which then gets
    “rehydrated” client-side.
 2. The other is a collection of static HTML files and one or two CSS files. No
    JavaScript anywhere.

If you didn’t know any better, you would expect almost all normal users to have
[2] and professional engineers to have something like [1], but it’s actually
the inverse: only few professional software engineers can “afford” to have the
second option as their personal website, and almost all normal users are stuck
with overcomplicated solutions.

Weird as it might be, it’s not a great mystery why that is: it’s easier to spin
up a Wordpress blog than it is to figure out by yourself all the intermediate
steps:

 1. Buy a domain
 2. Find a hosting platform
 3. Configure DNS
 4. Find an SSG (or handcraft everything yourself)
 5. Learn how to setup a deployment pipeline

And so, while we software engineers enjoy free hosting & custom domain support
with GitHub Pages / Cloudflare Pages / etc, normal users are stuck with a bunch
of [7]greedy clowns that make them pay for every little thing, all while
wasting ungodly amounts of computational power to render what could have been a
static website in 99% of cases.

Last week I spoke at SquiggleConf in Boston about my experience writing a
language server for HTML. Most of the talk is tactical advice on what to do (or
avoid) when implementing one, but I concluded the talk with a more high-level
point, which I will now report here fully as conclusion to this blog post.

    When I published SuperHTML, I discovered that it was [8]the first ever
    language server for HTML that reported diagnostics to the user. I wrote a
    blog post about it, it got [9]on the frontpage of Hacker News and nobody
    corrected me, so you know it’s true.

    I originally found it a funny thing, but thinking about it more, it’s a bit
    sad that this is the case. Linters do exist, and people can get diagnostics
    in their editor, but that’s usually tooling tied to a specific frontend
    framework and not vanilla HTML, which leads to people opting to use
    frameworks even if they don’t really have a real need for all the
    complexity that those frameworks bring.

    And that’s bad in my opinion. Not because of an abstract appreciation for
    simplicity, but because the web doesn’t belong just to software engineers.
    The more we make the web complex, the more we push normal users into the
    enclosures that we like to call social networks.

    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.

    This is not something that startups or big tech can solve for us, their
    economic incentives are just too misaligned, so I invite you all to help
    make the web more accessible, partially as a matter of taking pride in our
    craft, and partially because the web used to be more interesting when more
    of it was made by people different from us.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
[10]← Critical Social Infrastructure for Zig Communities   •   [11]Yes, Go Does
Have Exceptions →   or   [12]Back to the Homepage

References:

[1] https://kristoff.it/
[2] https://kristoff.it/
[3] https://twitter.com/croloris
[4] https://twitch.tv/kristoff_it
[5] https://youtube.com/c/ZigSHOWTIME/
[6] https://github.com/kristoff-it
[7] https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/04/wordpress-vs-wp-engine-drama-explained/
[8] https://kristoff.it/blog/first-html-lsp/
[9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41512213
[10] https://kristoff.it/blog/critical-social-infrastructure/
[11] https://kristoff.it/blog/go-exceptions/
[12] https://kristoff.it/