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Comment by gulugawa | Hacker News Reader

I found that Vite does a great job of deploying static websites. All I had to do was add Vite as a dev dependency in my pacakge.json and make sure all the page routes in vite.config.js.

I've been skeptical about trying Astro because it seems to have unnecessary complexity. Also, I don't see any evidence that Cloudflare is going to prioritize making Astro easier to use.

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What in Astro would make it easier to use? Or, what makes it more complex to use than you'd like? We're always open to feedback!

The first thing I would do is stop trying to support AI tools, and remove any comments about AI from the documentation.

Generative AI is not suitable for building content-driven websites because it lacks context to understand subjective user preferences.

Also, having .astro files to implement island functionality is unnecessary. Interactivity can be implemented with Javascript using web components.

Yeah, I agree on the AI front. Although outside of the AI page, I don't believe we have other content on it. It was intentional to keep it separate from the rest of the docs. I know we've recently discussed making changes / removing some of that content.

I love web components (one of the things that got me into Astro), but it can be helpful to reach for something like Solid when you get into more complex UI. Most Astro projects will never need to reach for that, which is why there's no UI framework available by default.

Astro definitely tries to stick to a minimal defaults approach by design. We'd rather people start from a simple, minimal boilerplate, and reach for solutions (e.g. UI frameworks, on-demand rendering) only when they run into a problem it solves.

What are you doing about repeated content?

There's a Vite plugin that can be used to insert identical HTML on multiple pages without JavaScript. I use it for the navbar and footer: https://www.npmjs.com/package/vite-plugin-handlebars

For repeated content where JavaScript is required, I use web components.

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