He could have the same scores/performance and still get the full advantages you mentioned.
But yes, handcrafting html is pointless at some point, especially if you have to update the contents every so often
It's probably about 2-4 hours for an experienced developer to figure out how to setup and maintain a static site generator assuming no unexpected problems, then get familiar with the syntax and structure, so hopefully the labor savings from using a static site generator is worth that.
I don't see how you can call yourself "lazyjeff" when you've just written this, tbh.
There goes your super-lean stack and we're back to square-one.
Nothing against a lightweight stack, but simplicity doesn't necessarily have to exclude functionality.
And if all you need are dynamic headers and footers, just wrap those in 'php include' tags and rename the files to .php. It's still HTML and CSS that's getting rendered.
> So... if I don’t use any templating system, how do I update my header, footer or nav? Well, simply by using the ”Replace in files” feature of any good text editor. They don’t need frequent updates anyway. The benefits of using a templating system is not worth the cost of introducing the tooling it requires.
Other people use static site generation, you use search and replace in your editor - not much of difference. Your approach is slower in long term, but with your on average 1 article per year it will take some time until you reach the threshold.
Far too often I see people spend days to save 2 seconds (and then proceed to not realize the savings over a long enough timespan)
These days you can do the same thing with about 5 lines of Python.
And the user's time doesn't?
If you can shave off a bit of loading/processing time for every request you will have improved the experience for countless people. Sure, using just HTML+CSS is a bit extreme, but for many sites the removal of some social media embeddings/trackers and switch to static site generation could improve it by an order of magnitude.
It's not that hard even with.
My stack consists of HTML/CSS, and a small program to stitch headers and footers onto documents generated with markdown.
If anyone would like to see it, it should be in the Sourcehut page linked in my profile. The program is a hacky (but functional) piece of garbage however.
E: Spelling
Sure, I could just copy/paste/replace content as it changes. But I don't want to have to be doing that any time I decide I want to change or add something. And I'm known to be a source of human error.
I ended up going Node+Express+EJS for the includes and certain more dynamic content on pages. It works well enough, page sizes are still small. Also considered some static site generators but at the time they seemed like overkill for what I wanted. Maybe there's a tool out there that will compile to plain old HTML files that I'm unaware of, I don't keep up much on front-end things.
It's actually fairly powerful and you can get quite a lot done with it.