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bryanlarsen

You could use server side includes instead, which have been a feature of web servers for about 20 years now...

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Not if you host on S3, for example.

Or on brace.io (aka Dropbox)

A legitimate problem we're solving by… inventing a new templating language.

Did we need a new one to do this? Absolutely none of the hundreds of existing languages could have possibly worked, so let's reinvent SSI with different syntax?

Then just web spider SSI running on a local server.

Or someone should write an SSI static site generator.

A fine line, but static pages will be slightly faster than SSI.

Edit: Although what would be really nice would be the same kind of pre-processor that works with apache ssi directives

They'll be infinitesimal faster for the server which will sit idle most of the time anyway... and much slower for you when you make a minor header/footer mod locally, and then you need to re-upload all pages that have a header (i.e. all pages).

I'm sorry, but this project feels more like "art" than a practical tool.

Plus, with a few basic lines of PHP (available on every shared host) you can pre-generate your site statically as well (and on the server, to save you the re-uploading).

Presumably the 're-upload all pages' bit can be automated. As far the reset, the trade-off depends on how often you're updating content versus the amount of traffic coming to your site; in many cases, a tiny saving on frequently-occurring page delivery is well worth a big delay on one-off page generation.

So basically, we've gone down a path of solving problems we've created ourselves.

>and much slower for you when you make a minor header/footer mod locally, and then you need to re-upload all pages that have a header

You should automate that with Grunt or Gulp. Static .html pages is best practise these days instead of dynamic templating.

It's best practice to not use the term "best practice" these days ;) (sorry, couldn't resist)

rsync will easily handle a few lines changed in a large number of files.

Or you could just, y'know, run the static site generator on the server. What Linux doesn't have Python installed?

or you could just, 'y'know, run SSI. what web server doesn't have SSI? What problem are we actually solving here?

Serving pure HTML files off S3 is pretty popular. No SSI there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7432097 also, which is it. are we on s3 or on a linux server with python?

nginx?

http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_ssi_module.html

Ha, color me surprised then :)

mod_disk_cache and mod_mem_cache make that pretty irrelevant.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_disk_cache.html

re:edit hxincl uses a similar style as ssi but with a couple of enhancements:

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/en/man1/hxincl.1....

if you want exactly SSI syntax, ain't nuthin' stopping you from pointing curl at localhost.

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