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Comment by door101 | Hacker News Reader

IMO the solution is to design around these constraints, ie, don’t include a menu on your blog posts, just a link to the home page, which has a list of all the posts.

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By that point though, you're dropping actual useful website features. What if I want a consistent style across my pages? What if I like restyling the whole website & I don't want to manually edit dozens of HTML files to do that? What if I think a header bar or a "recent posts" section would be nice?

I'm not saying it's bad to design a website in plain HTML, but it is critically limiting, and I wouldn't recommend it over a simple generator setup. If you're really opposed to using a fully-featured SSG, it'd be pretty simple to write a shell script that uses mustache(5) [1] to plug html articles into a template. That's almost as simple and clean as plain html, but it's a real step up when it comes to what it lets you do.

[1]: https://mustache.github.io/mustache.5.html

I want to clarify -- what I'm describing is how I would design a simple website using plain HTML. I have no opposition to SSG's, but just want to present an option for what it would look like if you eschew them completely.

And then you've completely destroyed the point of hypermedia.

What do you mean? You can still like to other documents, just drop the idea of linking to the same list of documents on every page

That works, but it's not what users want. Granted this is personal anecdata, but I've spent years pushing back on client expectations in the name of architecting things in a way the web supports at the lowest levels, and it's been an exercise in failure. No user is going to accept that behavior in a blog, and frankly as a reader on the internet, I find that solution pretty lame as well. I absolutely agree with minimizing the impedance mismatch between how we develop and how the web actually works and the associated tool-chain simplifications that come with that, but at some point we have to accept that web tech just wasn't designed to do what we need from it and add some layers on top. The challenge is balance.

I am not sure what is so radical about this. Let's take Medium as an example (pulled some random article from the front page):

https://medium.com/change-your-mind/the-simple-40-minute-mor...

What we have is, essentially, a blog post that could be written in pure HTML, and a link to the user's profile, which looks like this: https://ashley-richmond.medium.com/ This is one of the most popular blogging platforms and follows exactly the hub-and-spoke navigation model that I described.

Now, I do what to clarify, what I proposed is how I would build a website using plain HTML. I would certainly not go so far as to claim that it is the best way to build any website, SSG's have many advantages, but what I'm saying is that if one is going to write a plain HTML website, the easiest way is to accept the fundamental limitations of that approach, including a hub-and-spoke navigation vs a navbar. If you're writing a plain HTML site, you're probably a bit iconoclastic and willing to accept breaking some standard practices.

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