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HTML.

Unironically have been migrating my static pages (from Nextjs and Eleventy) to plain HTML and love it. Of course depends on your use case if that is feasible.





Plain html has two things going against it.

First, it doesn't have any provisions for code reuse. So, if you have multiple pages that use the same header, same footer, or same navigation menu, your options are either to copy-paste it (gross), or to build the final html out of smaller pieces, at which point you've reinvented either a static site generator or a web server.

Second, if you write long stretches of text, the html markup can get in the way, as opposed to unobtrusiveness of something like markdown.


Yea I think I’ll write my own static generator that just combines 3 templates for header/body/footer and converts markdown from the body. Should be fun project.

I’m tired of the constant update pressure from existing solutions and I only need something dead simple.


> at which point you've reinvented either a static site generator ...

It doesn't have to be Astro though. You can build something super simple that just includes the header, footer, and nav. Leaving most of the site as plain HTML.


Yes; that's Eleventy. Or Hugo. Or Jekyll. They are extremely simple, without the bells and whistles of Astro.

Or I don't know, use WebComponents.

How would this help? You would want your header render on the server, wouldn't you? Not to incur a CLS penalty, right? How does a web component help in this scenario?

Same, and I was starting to feel kind of strange doing anything in html/php in 2026 but then I looked at everything else and realized I'd have to start from scratch again. Plain ol' HTML has worked great.



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