Ask HN: Does anyone write HTML anymore?

I still do a lot of hand-coded and static HTML. I'm old-school and have a lot of muscle memory, so 9/10 it's just faster for me to throw together a page of HTML for a custom project and throw it in a directory than to muck about with a CMS or anything server-side.

> My main concern is that while search engines can certainly parse JavaScript, I suspect that they still perform best with HTML.

This isn't really true anymore, and the evidence for this is that Google themselves uses user-facing JS for lots of applications. Regardless, you can still assess the SEO friendliness of any page with the available tools.

That said, there is a good case that you should reduce the complexity of your page whenever possible. If you can get away without a bunch of JS calls, you are introducing fewer things that can introduce mistakes or performance problems.

I agree. Simplicity is better.

JS is an embellishment. Think of an electric stairs, it still works even with no power. I do all my sites like this. It must work without JS, because some users disable JS for privacy or accessibility reasons, and I care about those users.

Nice analogy about the stairs.

>> I understand that tools like Next.js and Remix allow you to generate server-side React that ultimately produces plain HTML output. However, what if I don't want a backend at all and still desire straightforward HTML output?

Then write HTML? I don't understand what you are insinuating at all. Is this a hard stance? The web is flexible enough these days to allow javascript or for you to write HTML if you want to, which you seem to desire.

My point is that for certain types of content, especially simple blogs, relying solely on JavaScript can create unnecessary dependencies. It's not a hard stance but rather a consideration of the trade-offs between convenience and accessibility.

There definitely are more than a few people who hand code the HTML for their sites. Often, it's people who need something simple -- no scripting, no database back end, none of that stuff. Just HTML and maybe some simple CSS.

I know a couple of people who build their (infrequently updated) sites using Markdown, pandoc, a custom HTML template, and a simple shell script.

Yeah, Markdown + a custom template is the approach that I've recently been taking, though using Python instead of the shell script (but the shell script would be more interesting, now that I think about it).

The shell scripts used by the people I know are pretty simple, encapsulating the string of pandoc commands and pointing to an HTML template. Nothing fancy -- just a convenience when running a tool that they don't use very often.

Yes, I write plain HTML, and have done since 199-<cough>, with JS sprinkles in sometimes. Most of the pages of my current main site have no JS at all.

Almost all (there are some legit exceptions, but not many, IMHO) pages should be functional (even if maybe less pretty) with JS turned off.

Yeah, I think these days it is almost an art to not use JS. Saw a purely text-based blog use it the other day to generate the site nav... all in text... just links. Could not even see the text links without JS enabled.

If you want 'some' interactivity (i.e. minimal js), it might be worth taking a look at htmx.

i.e. Page is mostly static, but if click 'add' etc, generate html from the server and insert it into the dom using attributes.

Have heard a lot of good things about HTMX.

I enjoy writing JS. It's actually my favorite programming language.

But there are plenty of times when it's unnecessary.

It's interesting think about people who, when they need a web site, turn to Wordpress.

There's HTML, which they're not really writing themselves. But there's also a lot of PHP.

Markdown-driven static site generators would probably fulfill a majority of those use cases as well.