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Comment by filmgirlcw | Hacker News Reader

I love this as a pure thought exercise/experiment — and it reminds me a lot of the types of websites we used to build 20 years ago.

That said, once the templating/boilerplate stuff comes into play, the author is like half a step away from trying to recreate PHP, which originally stood for Personal Home Page. Like, he’s even using PHP for his RSS feed!

Like, I’m not opposed to these thought experiments in the slightest — but I can’t help at the irony that most of these “simple” website engines (not talking about this approach specifically) almost always lead us back to our earliest CMS implementations.

I’m in my 30s. I literally grew up on pure HTML. But as much as I abhor how bloated current CMSs are, I also shudder when I remember how hard it was to create and manage HTML (and later, HTML and CSS) files by hand to update/maintain anything but the most basic website.

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Yes it's funny when he writes "If you find the previous step too much work, write a shell script that copies the directory and removes the old content for you.". I can already see the next thought: "Well I have this script processing all my directories... may as well use it to do simple string replacement too, that way I can insert a link to the latest blog post", etc. Basically just PHP but with a more complicated custom setup.

> Well I have this script processing all my directories...

I didn’t suggest that; I suggested something like the following:

    cp -r "$1" "$2"
    sed -i '...' "$2/index.html" # remove old text

Not at all like PHP.

It's still a script though. If there's a need for a script at all, one may as well do `php index.php > index.html` or use a static site builder as that will give a lot more flexibility.

Simplifying the process of creating static sites and avoiding existing tools has been tried many times and none of the solutions is really satisfying. In the end, most require "just a small script", but which is likely to grow in complexity over time. I guess creating static sites is not that straightforward so it makes sense to use existing tools to keep things simple.

Well, I guess we’ll see if my script (that doesn’t even exist) grows.

I don't mean to criticize. Your idea is an interesting approach but I'm simply not convinced.

Somebody else in this thread said it right, I think: the primary reason that PHP, CMSs etc. got popular is that people wanted the same header on every page, with the same links, instead of just a “back” link. I really have no need for that, which is why pure HTML works for me.

Of course, if I want an RRS feed, I need some dynamic generation. But I also think it stops there.

I totally understand that this works for you — and like I said, I’m not discounting this as a fun thing to do.

But I guess my broader point is that if I have to create a shell script to quickly generate the boilerplate file stuff for a new post/page, I’m _basically_ already doing what early PHP was designed to do. And at a certain point (and again, I’m not talking about you specifically, just the movements around this so-called simplicity more generally), we’re reinventing stuff that was literally created 25 years ago for these very reasons.

I’m hardly innocent of this either. As much as I hate them, I fantasize about and start working on a new CMS or SSG at least twice a year, only to inevitably abandon my efforts once boredom/frustration sets in.

> But I guess my broader point is that if I have to create a shell script to quickly generate the boilerplate file stuff for a new post/page, I’m _basically_ already doing what early PHP was designed to do.

I don’t think my proposed shell script (which I don’t even use) adds any complexity. (See my other comment [1] about it.)

Of course, I agree that it can go too far, and yes, sometimes we’re reinventing old stuff, but sometimes, we’re rather discovering that something that happens to be old actually works pretty well, if not better than whatever modern method we were using.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20241438

My thoughts as well. It’s not that people don’t realize you can write HTML in HTML - it’s just, we’ve long understood the caveats; it has poor hygiene. The only practical way to avoid needing duplication is scripting or frames, which is not ideal for the end users.

I wonder if there’s no way of making frames work. It seems like such a waste to have the same HTML code for navigation on every single file.

I think for usability and accessibility alone, we moved to scripting instead.

Frames were also often used for layout purposes, and when we all accepted the idea that markup and presentation should be separate, CSS was a much better solution.

> The only practical way to avoid needing duplication is scripting or frames, which is not ideal for the end users.

Or static generation? (e.g. I rolled my own)

Yes, that’s the idea.

I thought PHP was always 'PHP hypertext preprocessor'; so thanks for that - https://www.php.net/manual/en/history.php.php .

I probably first came across it at PHP 3, it was quite a step up from SSI for my frame based site.

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