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Comment by varrock | Hacker News Reader

I felt this way when approaching my personal site. I was falling into the Gatsby trap and then realized all I needed were HTML, CSS, and a few JavaScript files. I think you see over-engineered solutions as a result of career driven development and the hype around these libraries/frameworks on forums/social media.

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Problems start when you need to change the HTML structure, the CSS file name, or having a paginated list of your blog. If you do publish a lot, you'll need some sort of CMS.

These frameworks/libraries are trying to replace WordPress, because WordPress is also a mess to work with.

> you'll need some sort of CMS.

You will not need a CMS unless you publish multiple articles per day (and even then...). That's far beyond anything the preceding posts were talking about, so it's not really relevant.

or unless you build a site for somebody for whom editing Markdown files is too much

My personal website is still based on PHP, after using XML/XSLT for a short while, I rewrote it in PHP 5 shortly after it became available.

While at work, it has been mostly Java JEE/ASP.NET since they exist.

When I play around with WebGL, it is all JavaScript modules and script tags, nothing else.

No babel, no webpack, no npm, nothing, just browser standard capabilities.

Fully agree with your point of view.

The irritating thing is that this is often possible even with modern JS. I shipped a rather complex app (though still essentially CRUD that's used internally) this winter that is Vue 3 based. It's just the Vue library itself plus the app logic, directly included using script tags. No other libraries for Vue, no build steps and so on.

It just feels great that I could just immediately start fixing things on any computer should an issue pop up next year or so, without worrying about dependencies or some build step being broken etc.

Yeah, I really share the sentiment.

I guess younger generations get taught the cargo cult ways of SPAs, and aren't able to realise how much simpler it can be done, specially be letting the browser do the work, instead of replicating it on a dynamic language.

Just from what I've heard about Deno - isn't this exactly what they are aiming for? Bring Node/JS back closer to the browsers and make use of ES modules etc?

I'm also making my blog in plain html/css/js with the goal of making it as minimal as possible - in fact the JS wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the fact that it includes some running code examples about demoscene stuff.

Except for my procrastination, it's a real pleasure to write this way, no frameworks, no libraries, no build systems with 10k dependencies, no preprocessors for content - just write plain HTML and be done with it, it's always forward compatible, you always have all HTML features and don't have to worry about some preprocessors capability... If I ever have a genuine need for some kind of build process, it will be a self contained script, I'm fed up with the fatigue of the churn of the web tooling world - i'll stuck to a script that will still run in 10 years.

I did make one choice to alleviate the tediousness of writing tags: 'white-space: pre-wrap', which allows you to avoid html tags for basic stuff like paragraphs. Also using fixed width font and ch units since it's mostly a coding blog so this fits well and allows ascii diagrams without extra work... authoring feels like mostly writing an old skool text file with some nice HTML/CSS upgrades.

This plus a CMS. Writing is a separate activity for me. I also like that it handles tags, metadata and pagination for me. Templating and thumbnail generation is also nice.

have a link?

I even do similar for a microblog: https://demo.mro.name/shaarligo - try without JS and look at the source (not the DOM).

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