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Comment by rudedogg | Hacker News Reader

Check out https://www.getzola.org. It's a single executable. It even does syntax highlighting (without using client-side javascript).

I moved to it from Jekyll/Hugo, because I hate dealing with Ruby and dependencies like you!

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There seems to be apathy in Rust community towards using client-side js for syntax highlighting. Rust documentation and The Rust Book uses it for no good reason. Code in examples doesn't change, and the way they are highlighted doesn't change. In my opinion it clashes with the philosophy of the language - that as much as possible should be done before the code is run.

Aside from my pedantry, it causes computers to make more unnecessary computations and our civilization emits more carbon. It also affects me because I currently have an old CPU and it takes a few seconds for syntax highlighting to kick in. Every time I press "Back" in my browser, syntax highlighting needs to be recalculated as well.

Oh well, on the bright side I have an itch to scratch :-).

> Code in examples doesn't change, and the way they are highlighted doesn't change.

I'd consider it an accessibility issue - hardcoding the syntax highlighting on the backend makes it more difficult for people to change using accessibility tools. Whereas with js-based highlighting, you can probably just change the theme and get readable output.

If you used semantic class names you could change the theme with just css.

What kind of accessibility tools are you thinking of that would work with JS highlighting, but not server-generated? (Given that generally both would produce roughly the same in-browser DOM, which is what most modern accessibility tools work against)

You seem to be describing accessibility tools for completely blind users, and I think they were describing accessibility tools for users with other sorts of disabilities. For example, someone who uses a custom stylesheet or a browser extension to make the page have higher contrast.

No, the question applies to those just as much.

As far as I know, parsing the accessibility tree is primarily limited to screen readers / brail displays. Am I missing something?

I'm speaking of the normal DOM representation of the HTML in the page. A server-side highlighter generates HTML with css classes or styling attached that gets turned into a DOM by the browser. A JS-based highlighter edits the DOM by adding css classes or attaching styling. The in-browser representation of the end result, which a browser extension likely works with, can be the same, and how it looks like exactly is more important for their functionality than if the server or JS did it.

> that would work with JS highlighting, but not server-generated?

Mainly that JS highlighting normally works with a theme variable which is much easier to change to get, e.g., a high-contrast theme than having to muck about with 10-20 different CSS styles.

Ignoring that option, working with a known set of CSS styles in the DOM is going to be easier than dealing with John Q Random's own particular set for highlighting (assuming they haven't used the same as a popular JS highlighter, of course!)

(To my shame, whatever Hugo is now using for syntax highlighting makes an awful mess - everything is "style:color#123456", no semantic information - I'll be fixing that ASAP.)

apathy - neutral / "don't care"

antipathy - negative / "hatred"

While another word or phrase would be preferable there, the GP did in fact use the word correctly.

They are claiming that the rust team uses client side JS because they don't care about the negative implications of doing so.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Some of the other commenters have pointed out that Hugo also has standalone binaries, I just didn't notice them last time I looked. What made you choose Zola over Hugo?

I think the main reason was the built in syntax highlighting, and simplicity. I've decided to move away from themes, and just code simple CSS by hand - so Zola kind of fits that mindset.

Hugo definitely has more features. If you think you'll want to do some complex hierarchies in your blog/site, or want a lot of themes to pick from I'd go with Hugo.

Hopefully that helps!

Edit: I think Hugo used to require Pygments (a pip package), but it looks like that's no longer the case. If it did that probably nudged me towards Zola too.

I really enjoyed Zola as well. It's sufficiently simple that the learning curve is really gentle but has just enough features to cover all my needs for a static site.

Coupling it with Tailwind for styling meant that developing the theme was really smooth (slowest part of changing a template was waiting for the browser to refresh, i.e. < 1s).

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