The “CSS router” has always been quite the clever trick for navigating sufficiently small sites. This site uses it to scroll switch pages, and portable.fyi gets clever with visibility :target switching. Do it just right and no one notices unless they “inspect the elements”.

It’s always humbling when I get around to reading a web related spec. HTML and CSS have a lot of functionality. JavaScript’s not bad (it’s the easiest part of web development) but gives you just enough rope to do super silly things like reinventing all built in browser functions.

White spaces in HTML trick many into writing complex CSS — web development is trollish that way. Firefox’s developer tools show generated white spaces! Hopefully your abstraction is munging HTML faithfully. It’s easy to fight white spaces without realising it. That generally leads to using unsuitable display types and other shenanigans.

WordPress rants are a joy to read, but where’s the simpler, safer replacement? Never forget that software is highly corporatized and mostly crafted for corporations, not humans. WordPress sits among the few that mere mortals can work with and understand. The complete revival of static sites might save us, maybe.

I might try out the Fresh framework from deno to see if the hype is true hype.

Reading about the Fresh framework lead me to an article about islands architecture and progressive hydration. “Island based client hydration” looks like a type of progressive enhancement.

Wonder how an adjustment to that theory pans out? Might be enough of a golden hammer for most use cases but imo, scaling/speed issues are more fundamental/situational. You could swap between or hybridize client/server all you want and still mess up.

Hugo has template performance metrics with the --templateMetrics flag. Here’s a snippet of the metrics for this site.

$ hugo --templateMetrics

Start building sites … 
hugo v0.101.0+extended linux/amd64 BuildDate=unknown

Template Metrics:

 cumulative       average       maximum         
   duration      duration      duration  count  template
 ----------      --------      --------  -----  --------
7.278303484s   49.177726ms  237.175705ms    148  partials/generate-feeds.html
7.22797312s   112.93708ms  246.988674ms     64  _default/single.html
6.982028147s   83.119382ms  245.262274ms     84  partials/navigator-right.html
6.683942678s   47.070018ms  237.223569ms    142  partials/web-ring.html
1.685089741s    5.561352ms   28.254398ms    303  _default/summary.html

A nice thing about following lots of diverse technical feeds is that you’ll always kinda know what’s next. The “next” darling in the realm of front end web development seems to be Next.js? Meanwhile, I’m still messing around with WordPress installs.

The static versus dynamic site wars are mostly conflicts over where discomfort and computation should happen at increasing scale. You’ll either be lagging/computing on the server side, the client or, maybe somewhere in between.