the platform i use stores everything in a database. it doesn't even support reading static files from disk. and why should that even matter. the filesystem is just a different kind of database. as for purely static pages, i happen to have a small website that is purely static too, served from the same platform. and already maintaining the navigation for a few pages is a pain. i could use a static site generator, but then i'd have to use different tools from the rest of the site. and that also increases the maintenance effort and adds dependency on yet another tool. my current plan is to keep the pages static but use js to create the navigation. that would add the cost of a REST API call to get the list of pages and affect the cacheability for the navigation part. if only html had an <include> tag then maintaining the navigation would be a lot easier without js.