Sergey | the little SSG

Introducing Astro: Ship Less JavaScript

In Astro, you compose your website using UI components from your favorite JavaScript web framework (React, Svelte, Vue, etc). Astro renders your entire site to static HTML during the build. The result is a fully static website with all JavaScript removed from the final page.

YES!

When a component needs some JavaScript, Astro only loads that one component (and any dependencies). The rest of your site continues to exist as static, lightweight HTML.

That’s the way to do it! Make the default what’s best for users (unlike most JavaScript frameworks that prioritise developer convenience at the expense of the end user experience).

This is a tagline I can get behind:

Ship Less JavaScript

SofaConf 2020 - a technical write-up | Trys Mudford

Trys describes the backend architecture of the excellent Sofa Conf website. In short, it’s a Jamstack dream: all of the convenience and familiarity of using a database-driven CMS (Craft), combined with all the speed and resilience of using a static site generator (Eleventy).

I love the fact that anyone on the Clearleft events team can push to production with a Slack message.

I also love that the site is Lighthousetastically fast.

HTML Includes That Work Today | Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA

Scott writes up that super smart transclusion trick of his.

Jekyll Includes are Cool - daverupert.com

Dave explains how Jekyll Includes are starting to convert him to web components. The encapsulation is nice and neat. And he answers the inevitable “but why not use React?” question:

Writing HTML that contains JavaScript, not JavaScript that contains HTML, feels good to me.

The key feature for me is that this approach doesn’t have to depend on JavaScript in the browser:

I like that Web Components are an entirely client-side technology but can be rendered server-side in existing tech stacks whether it’s Jekyll, Rails, or even some Enterprise Java system.

scottjehl/PE: declarative data binding for HTML

This is an interesting idea from Scott—a templating language that doesn’t just replace variables with values, but keeps the original variable names in there too.

Not sure how I feel about using data- attributes for this though; as far as I know, they’re intended to be site-specific, not for cross-site solutions like this.