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Comment by flyingfences | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the overall sentiment, but it seems a little ironic that this author is pining for a return to the simple old days of hand-written HTML but has written a site that doesn't even show links to its own pages with JS disabled.

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The options available to the author are:

1. Manually add a link to every page on the site each time a new one is added.

2. Give up on hand-writing HTML and use a server-side templating system

3. Give up on having navigation on each page

4. Load the navigation through JavaScript

Given that they want to hand-write HTML, and they (presumably) want it to be easy enough for everyone to do, the JS options seems like a reasonable choice.

3 seems like the sane option to me... That's what I remember most sites doing back in the day if they weren't going for 2. Have a top-level "directory" page with individual pages linking back up to it and to the homepage, rather than having pages that link to literally nothing at all.

That's my preference as well, but I can understand how someone might want a more complex design while still using hand-written HTML.

Perhaps a good compromise would be to put a link to a navigation page in the sidebar, but when available, use JavaScript to replace the link with the navigation page content.

Static site generators exist to solve this problem. No need for server-side rendering at all.

"learning to hand code HTML" doesn't exclude using Javascript or CSS, or anything else for that matter.

No, it doesn't, but the general idea is that scripts are supposed to supplement the base page, not needlessly replace effectively static pieces of it.

I wrote a ton of CSS and early JS in Windows Notepad. Or ON PAPER if the computer(s) I had access to were in use.

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