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Comment by clarry | Hacker News Reader

> I worry that many developers (maybe even you, dear reader) are settling for suboptimal, restrictive static-site generators that place limits on the interactivity and flexibility of your website.

I wonder what sort of interactivity you want on your text?

> This degrades page load speeds and user experience, which accordingly degrades your rankings on Google. Instead I want every page of my site to be pre-rendered to a set of fully static assets

Oh, you want a static site. That's what I want too.

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>I wonder what sort of interactivity you want on your text?

In case you glossed over it, I think he said it in his post:

"But down the road, I may want to build a page that contains an interactive visualization, a filterable table, or a demo of a React component I'm open-sourcing."

I wonder if he actually tried embedding HTML into Markdown, because that's as simple and straightforward as it can be: just start writing HTML in the Markdown document, and after the closing element, continue with the markdown text. This should completely cover the requirement to embed interactive elements into markdown using a static site generator like Hugo or Jekyll without having to deal with an overly complex dependency like React.

Here's an example of embedding a WASM home computer emulator with just a few lines JS (and I'm not exactly a web development expert, so with a bit more knowledge and experimentation I'm sure this could be made much more fancy):

https://floooh.github.io/2019/01/05/wasm-embedding.html

I did, but I wasn't satisfied with that option.

I'd like the ability to embed arbitrary React+JSX into my Markdown, something which can theoretically be done (i.e. with the Hugo Babel plugin). But then I immediately realized I would have issues with importing my styling libraries (I used a custom-built Tailwind-esque set of emotion[0] classes) and using React Hooks.

As you can probably tell I have a hard time letting go of the power/flexibility of the React/SPA approach since it's all I've used for several years now.

I've been using Github pages with Markdown for my personal website and it is so simple and just works.

Haven't yet seen a reason to switch to anything else.

Isn't all of that done client side i.e. still possible with a static site?

Yes. You can go crazy with static sites. I use Github Pages for this. On one I've done a single-page Javascript-driven text adventure. On another I've embedded a Unity application that runs a dynamic 3D starmap with WebGL. I've also seen roguelikes. What you can't do is run server-side logic, but you can do an -awful- lot on the client.

When workplaces were still slowly still migrating to GIT, we had Git and SVN.

SVN rocked because you could run static sites in it, a little bit of jquery and whatever and I was building a ton of simple business productivity tool as single page apps. All with the peralta guarantee of support.

Yes. With static site generators you can still serve custom pages to your heart's content... It's not like you can -only- create posts and that's it.

With Hugo/Zola I set my generator to include MathJax javascript if I enabled it in the front matter of the post. Etc.

Even if you need a data API - if its just a demo (or slow moving data), you can just directly serve .json files.

I feel the YAGNI is strong in this one.

I'm not using "static" to imply "non-interactive", just that there shouldn't be a server that does any rendering/data loading.

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