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Comment by crunchlibrarian | Hacker News Reader

Remember flat html? Remember servers that would generate pages? Remember when CSS preprocessors didn't peg the CPU for 50ms?

Maybe we should investigate this ancient tech of the old ones.

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I've never seen a setup where a css preprocessor didn't just generate the output once at build-time.

Oh, people can abuse anything. Maybe they want their CSS all in-line at the top of the dynamic HTML. So they run the preprocessor during page generation on the server.

Use a separate CSS via link tag? Oh no, I heard that was slow. Set expires cache header for 1 day? Oh no, that makes testing hard for me and what if the CSS changes?

Web developers sometimes use the dumbest reasons to avoid doing good things.

More likely, they're completely oblivious to the impact their changes are making, and they're just looking to "make it work" on their computer for that one page load a minute.

CSS generated in the server still means it’s not pegging user CPU for 50ms like they said.

I think these meandering rants are a tad silly.

I read it as using 50ms of CPU and it didn't say where. Using an extra 50 ms of server CPU happens all the time in my experience and no one seems to think this is a problem.

At least not until they try to solve the C10K problem or survive the "Slashdot Effect." That's when people discover that static pages are king.

> So they run the preprocessor during page generation on the server.

Allow me to one-up with this: https://github.com/medialize/sass.js/

> API for emscripted libsass to run in the browser

Yes we remember how limited was the web back then. I also miss those times, good memories. But to make money out of it we had to follow the latest trends in UX since they attracted more visitors than us. The first DHTML, the java applets, the arrive of flash, and then XHTMLHttpRequest used by google in their new born gmail. So now we are here with these new awesome technologies and we want to go back. But I’m not sure it will be fun.

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