Show HN: The static, static site generator

by Xeoncross • 12 years ago

187 96 12 years ago

davej• 12 years ago

Interesting, I wonder do search engines crawl pages like this?

You'd need to add at least a `doctype` and `title` for this to be valid HTML5 (not that it necessarily matters for a search engine crawler).

Edit: Also if you added the script to the top of the doc then you could `display: none` the doc and wait for the css to load before making it `display: block`. This would overcome the FOUC effect.

nkozyra3• 12 years ago

As I understand it, wouldn't Google render this page while crawling? Perhaps they'd punish it for doing so, but I think Google would have no issue with the content itself.

I also wonder how much FOUC you could incite by increasing the size of the markdown document.

Xeoncross5• 12 years ago

True, but don't forget that the JS and CSS is cached so after the first page load - every other page is instantly ready to be rendered.

lowmagnet• 12 years ago

I did something similar years ago with xslt rendering xml in browser. It used an xsl stylesheet loaded in the xml itself, similar to this approach. It was a pain to debug, and I'd imagine this approach is easier because tooling has caught up with this sort of thing.

I use httpsb so this comes through as a pile of text until I allow the js to do its thing. I'm ok with this, since a browser plugin that does markdown would work here too.

Sometimes I miss things like Archie that had very small network footprints due to technical requirements of the past. They really were able to focus on the content, like this solution.

X-Istence• 12 years ago

I loved the idea of using XSLT rendering to take an well formatted XML document and process it client side in the browser, but it came with more problems than it solved.

The tooling was terrible to accomplish it, but different browsers reacted slightly different to the XSLT, some had a flash of unstyled XML followed by it rendering the page using XSLT, JavaScript didn't work right since the page had to be served as XML not as HTML, Adsense my ad network at the time didn't work with it either.

XSLT had potential, but it never really caught on, and now we just have JavaScript frameworks that do all the rendering client side using JavaScript instead.

th0ma5• 12 years ago

I noticed a similar flash with this project, although the end result is very cool, and to think except for links, this is somewhat all Lynx compatible.

zokier2• 12 years ago

The obvious solution would be to create XSLT processor in JavaScript to override the browsers processing.

(no, don't do that, i was just joking)

mbrock• 12 years ago

Blogging shit is too complicated in all kinds of ways.

Think for a second about why we're writing here of all places.

All kinds of people write insightful stuff here for no reason other than that they're bored at work or because someone is wrong.

Because it's utterly simple and text-based.

It's a medium of communication, not a flashy thing to create your individual brand and promote yourself as an author and blah-blah-blah.

I wish people would always think about why certain places on the web become popular in such a way that they integrate themselves into peoples' lives and let them easily express their natural spontaneous creativity.

HN, reddit, LiveJournal, Craigslist, mailing lists, Usenet, forums, GeoCities, IRC, BBS, etc.

They all obviously focus on "content." More importantly they get out of the way and let human beings communicate without hinders.

philbarr• 12 years ago

So am I right in thinking that this is like a template, but the template gets added dynamically by javascript?

nkozyra3• 12 years ago

You can confirm this by inspecting the document - the markdown is parsed into nodes through regexp and then a full HTML document is constructed and injected into the DOM (or rather, creating the DOM and then injecting it).

Cool, fun, but probably not something for which I can see a practical use.

untitaker_2• 12 years ago

And now i want to generate a TOC ;)

hrjet• 12 years ago

Great point. Client-side can't do any meta analysis about the data, unless it fetches all the data. Which is a big waste of bandwidth and cpu.

untitaker_2• 12 years ago

Furthermore, unless you do some hackery in your .htaccess or something like that, there is not even a way to discover all existing pages.

j_s• 12 years ago

Dang it, I was hoping for a 'pick your features & download your customized version of jekyll'! I guess that would be a static site generator generator...

haldean• 12 years ago

I made a less-tricky, less-cool thing like this[0] and I still use it on my site today. It's really great to not have to recompile markdown or do anything other than a git-push on text files. The fact that view-source works on yours is super cool, though; nicely done!

[0] https://github.com/haldean/docstore

chavesn2• 12 years ago

What a great idea, I'm really impressed with the cleverness and execution.

A few thoughts and questions for you (you may have already thought of/know about):

- Have you thought about "well-formedness" for the HTML? I realize that adding anything besides the script tag would sort of ruin your point, and it would be nice if browsers accepted that, but also I feel there are sometimes hidden benefits to serving a well-formed document under the correct content type that the server said was being sent (or extension).

- This makes your site awesome to read with a text browser or curl.

- About 1/2 or 1/3 of the times I click "back" or "next", I can't scroll the page after it renders. (Chrome/MacOS)

- The footer support is cool, have you thought about how you would do more extensive template support? (Maybe there's no reason anything extra couldn't be placed in the footer -- analytics, even a header -- although I think a favicon might need to be in a `<head>` tag). Integrating this directly with Markdown, too, could be really cool.

- P.S. Your footer link says "Chanpter" :)

Great work, I love when I find something like this -- really clean, simple, and challenges the norms in a clever way. The result even appears quite polished.

Xeoncross5• 12 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. That is really what this project was about - thinking outside the box to solve problems.

Like most projects, I would expect elegant solutions to some of these problems to appear as more people think about the concept. I must admit, it works pretty nicely for such an abuse of technology.

pavel_lishin2• 12 years ago

- This makes your site awesome to read with a text browser or curl.

Unfortunately, Pocket (getpocket.com) slams everything into a single paragraph, with a # at the beginning.

(Which, granted, is better than the silent failure you get with Blogspot on Pocket, and the garbage you get with it via curl.)

BHSPitMonkey• 12 years ago

What about accessibility?

JetSpiegel• 12 years ago

This comes down to reimplementing a HTML rendering engine in Javascript. Accessibility is the least of their problems.

jscheel• 12 years ago

Now we just need a static site generator generator.

fournm• 12 years ago

Have the server inject the javascript into the page?

orthecreedence2• 12 years ago

Why not go a step further? http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?joel.3.219431.12

8ig8• 12 years ago

If only I had finished my framework framework.

p4bl02• 12 years ago

You may have fun reading about the three Futamura projections :-).

gramsey• 12 years ago

This is an awesome idea, and looks like it is very well executed. I have two suggestions:

- Add some sparse html tags (i.e. a basic doctype/body), which can help with search engine parsing.

- You'll notice that for a few milliseconds on page load, the text is shown before the JS rendering takes over. This can probably be solved via Javascript, just find a way to cache or pre-load the pages.

randomdrake3• 12 years ago

Another neat show of letting the client deal with the rendering.

From the example[1]:

"You see, there is really no need for the server to generate anything for simple article-based sites like this. If the user wants to read your blog they can spend a few processor cyles[sic] to render the page themselves."

This paradigm is beyond me and it seems to be growing for whatever reason. Client-side processors rendering bytes through a separate engine, other than the HTML one, only to have it eventually run through the HTML engine so the client can actually read it.

The thought that everyone has a decent machine to do the processing is, in my experience, still a false one. This was true 5-10 years ago, and I haven't seen evidence that it isn't still true today.

Your server probably has many, many cores. Probably SSD architecture. It is barely blinking to answer a request and deliver text. Why on earth would you leave the simple job of wrapping markup around text, to a machine that you know nothing about?

The average Internet user isn't terribly savvy. Their browser is possibly cluttered with add-ons. Their computer more than likely running 100s of background processes they know nothing about.

Depending on the stats you look at, in 2014, we're looking at a lot of folks with dual-core machines and a couple GB of memory, if they are lucky.

I can't understand why you would want to delay or hinder the experience to getting to your content.

While it may load really fast on your Macbook Pro Retina, or ThinkPad X1, that has a few text editors open and an up to date browser, the experience won't be true for everyone.

When did it become trendy for developers to put burdens on their clients with all of this front-end first thought? Just because it makes it easier for you to write and deploy, doesn't give you the excuse to put the burden on the user for rendering your stuff.

How many more times do we need to read about companies being forced into dropping this ill-conceived paradigm because they realized it made the experience for the client worse, and in many cases, made the development worse as well?

In this example, we end up with an HTML file that is all of 6,084 bytes.

To get there in this example, we used jr.js, a 5,616 byte file, to load showdown.js, a 14,859 byte file, and render 651 bytes of text. Sometimes, the loading and rendering is so slow, that the code itself has handling for it:

   	// Empty the content in case it takes a while to parse the markdown (leaves a blank screen)
	jr.body.innerHTML = '<div class="spinner"></div>';

21,126 bytes to generate 6,084 bytes of text which has to now be rendered (one more time) by the browser.

Wouldn't it be great if there was some standard about the bytes that were delivered over the wire that everyone could use and build upon? Folks should get together and build a really good processor of bytes coming over the wire that's delivered in a particular format to be rendered on the screen. It would be great for the Internet! You could browse the entire thing!

[1] http://xeoncross.github.io/jr/

Xeoncross5• 12 years ago

A server should serve. I to think too much front-end magic will slow down a site.

However, I actually created this on that dual-core laptop you are talking about. So not to take away from your point, but let me also take this from the other perspective - bandwidth.

The 6kB + 15kB Javascript files only initially seem to be a waste. After you think about the bandwidth you save transferring all the additional pages in plain markdown and using the (now) cached JS build each page actually results in much faster loading times even if the browser might have to spend a few hundred milliseconds rendering.

randomdrake3• 12 years ago

A server should serve. I to think too much front-end magic will slow down a site.
However, I actually created this on that dual-core laptop you are talking about.

Right, which is why you have stuff in your code about dealing with the fact that sometimes rendering the bytes coming down the wire is painfully slow. You commented out the spinner GIF, which has replaced the Java applet loading, or the Shockwave loading, we knew so well in the 90s and 00s.

So not to take away from your point, but let me also take this from the other perspective - bandwidth.

It would take visiting 3.4 posts of the size in the example before you would even reach the necessary bandwidth of the very first post.

Blog posts, by and large, get traffic for the single post in which someone is visiting and very, very rarely get hit up for a 2nd, and even more rarely a 3rd story on the same site.

Taking that into consideration, who is wasting more bandwidth?

even if the browser might have to spend a few hundred milliseconds rendering

Gather up 3 or 4 times waiting a few hundred milliseconds and now you're waiting multiple seconds. Which is more than enough time for folks to hit the back button.

I'm not dogging your efforts or your library. I hope you don't see it that way. I am simply saying that the amount of work going into client-heavy development these days, and the amount of folks hopping on the: "Wow, that's such a great idea!" bandwagon, should be limited (educated).

A server should serve clients. There are human beings attached to the requests. We, as developers, should hold ourselves to a higher standard of doing whatever we can to remove burden from the clients.

I don't know where the idea that developers should be unburdened and servers shouldn't work hard came from, but it stinks.

Pay $0.00000001 to ask the 16 CPUs to wrap text in markup. Sheesh.

bhaak• 12 years ago

I think your static, static blog generator is a cool idea and I nice gimmick. It lets you pause for a second and really think about how the responsibilities of serving a site and rendering its pages should be distributed.

But you can't really think that rendering a page with javascript is faster than serving a static html page with all the possible optimizations like gzip, etag and byte-range, etc.

Even though a gzipped markdown file might be a tiny bit smaller than the same content as a gzipped HTML file, so the bandwith difference is negligible, the browser will have the HTML file at once, whereas with jr it still needs to compile the markdown file into HTML and finally render it.

rubiquity• 12 years ago

Most blogs have insanely high bounce rates after the first page usually so all that extra script downloading rarely pays off.

dragonwriter• 12 years ago

When did it become trendy for developers to put burdens on their clients with all of this front-end first thought?

There's a certain sense to it from a scalability perspective -- sure, you've got the issue of whether you can really rely on the client to have the power to do the work you are offloading (and whether, especially in the mobile case, there are undesirable impacts to your users of placing more client processing demand even if they have the resources to do it), but the more is offloaded to the client, the less scaling demand is placed on the server -- as you get more users, the additional resource needs are met by their clients rather than by your server.

pdonis• 12 years ago

the more is offloaded to the client, the less scaling demand is placed on the server

If you're using an ordinary static site generator, your server scales the same: it's just sending static pages to clients either way. In fact, if you're like me, you don't even run the site generator on the server; you run it on your own machine, and upload the generated HTML files to the server, where they act just like any other static web pages.

randomdrake3• 12 years ago

but the more is offloaded to the client, the less scaling demand is placed on the server -- as you get more users, the additional resource needs are met by their clients rather than by your server.

I'm sorry, but this is the kind of thinking that is perpetuating this awful paradigm.

As you get more users your data set grows.

Are your clients going to be responsible for the memory necessary for the larger indexes? What about your cache, should we just introduce HTTP into the caching mechanism and hope that one of your clients has the data you wanted to deliver to someone else?

Are your clients going to be responsible for ensuring you don't max out your server with the amount of processes your httpd can handle?

Are your clients going to be responsible for load-balancing your requests between servers because your pipes are simply not big enough to be handled by a single web-server?

When was the last time you saw a person lugging around 16+ cores with 64GB of memory, SSD architecture, and fibre networking tied into multiple switches?

the more is offloaded to the client, the less scaling demand is placed on the server -- as you get more users, the additional resource needs are met by their clients rather than by your server.

Clients are not replacements for servers at all.

Why do people keep thinking that they're somehow being clever "offloading" work to the client? Do they know how much work has been put into networking stacks to ensure this type of offloading never happens?

How is it that you scale your clients? Do you ship them more memory? Pay more for their Internet connection? Send them a new phone?

Decades of networking work, by extremely talented individuals, to make sure the client has to do very little lifting at the layers closer to the metal by people much, much smarter than us.

Ignorantly nullified by a developer's misguided desires.

samstave• 12 years ago

My laptop has "many cores" and 16gb ram and SSD architecture.

My phone has quad cores, 2gb ram, 32G ssd.

pbhjpbhj• 12 years ago

My laptop has a single core and 768MB RAM with a spinning-rust architecture.

Know your user base is probably the answer here.

TeMPOraL• 12 years ago

I share the distaste for terribly suboptimal solutions, but I'd also like to add another thing - I don't understand this complete lack of concern for wasting power. Bits aren't free; if you make a million of computers redo the same computation that could be done on a single computer once, you're literally making humanity burn a million times more coal for it than needed. I know that this feels irrelevant for any single page, but when scaled globally, this kind of thinking scares and saddens me.

mplewis2• 12 years ago

The amount of energy we spend on rendering web pages each day pales in comparison to the amount we spend each day on transportation or even Bitcoin mining. A million times a relatively tiny amount is still relatively tiny.

It's an understandable argument, but I don't think it applies to client-side rendering.

e12e• 12 years ago

Let me point out that html, css, pngs and jpegs are not bitmap data that can be blitted directly to the screen.

It's not obvious that some simple js transforms is going to be much more (measurably more) resource intensive than laying out a rich html page, even if it is "static" ("just" css1,2,3 -- some of which may be animations).

Hypertext is hypermedia, hypermedia means an object oriented system -- an object oriented system means (some form of) programmability. I don't like the general trend towards "single page apps" for things that are just hypertext applications (such systems can be built with html and css and some javascript for enhancement) -- but this is sort of going the other way: If you just have "text" content, send text -- and then fix the broken useragent with some js so that said text presents nicely. If your useragent already handles text nicely (hello w3m) -- do nothing.

This solution has a certain elegance, with some careful (system) design, it allows for graceful degrading/progressive enhancement. It reads nicely in w3m, it's quite amendable to scraping (one could argue that semantic html is better, and it probably is in isolation, but, as Google seem to have concluded -- semantic ml simply doesn't scale when a large number of sites get it wrong (or just "different")).

[edit: Let me take some of that back -- this* system doesn't render well in w3m, but the rest of my points stand: the approach should be viable -- but maybe there needs to be something along the lines of:

    #at url along the lines of: example.com/some/post/
    <html>
      <noscript>To read without javascript go directly
      to: <a..> example.com/some/post/post.rst</noscript>
    <script src="magick.js">
    </html>

Where magick.js "knows" where to find post.rst, parse it and display it... ]

drdaeman• 12 years ago

More important, that's not only example of shifting where things render, but replacing documents with programs.

zokier2• 12 years ago

Indeed. I referred to that same thing in another thread couple months ago:

This is just the result of transitioning HTML to an applications framework. Now the application you use to view articles is not your browser, but Blogger (or WP etc).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7558912

(The context was rant about webapps that "hijacked" keyboard shortcuts unnecessarily)

peter-row• 12 years ago

http://peter-the-tea-drinker.com/pages/longjing-exmple.html

Summary - if you don't want to break the web you should do this:

1. If you must use Javascript templating, inline the JSON into the document.

2. If possible, actually template the document too.

Yes, single page apps are faster (because of the joke called javascript loading ... yes there's async, but it's broken, and you can load a script to load other scripts, but really ...). Except for when they load. Then there's a trip to your server, a trip to the CDN for the Javascript, then another trip to your server to get the document you wanted.

Inlining the JSON saves 1 trip. Having the document already prepared saves another (since most browsers will render before the Javascript at the bottom).

You won't notice running on localhost. It probably works ok on a good connection, if you're located in the same timezone. But with 200ms latency (on a mobile) and two round trips (plus your initial get) it makes a difference. And people using lynx or no-script won't tell you they can't read your site.

For the ~80% of people who only visit your site once, this is close to optimal.

You could trim it down a bit by querying your document, and building your data model from the static content, but that's just over engineering.

onion2k• 12 years ago

Moreover, on any relatively popular blog a post would be rendered by each visitor, so many thousands of times if the post is viewed a lot, rather than being rendered just once by the server. As an exercise in wastefulness it's a way up there.

joshvm• 12 years ago

I guess the only downside is that if your client has NoScript, they just see the raw Markdown. With HTML if the client has a text based browser things like links, images, etc will still work. I still use Lynx over SSH if I need to grab paywalled content from my work machine or check something on the local intranet when I'm out of the office.

The text based browser is splitting hairs, but NoScript isn't. Unless there are browsers that will natively render Markdown if served/detected (i.e. not a plugin)?

Blahah• 12 years ago

You could see that as an upside - Markdown is designed to be human-readable and is pretty successful in that design goal. So a NoScript user will see a rather nice plaintext.

billyhoffman• 12 years ago

uhhh, Markdown is "nicely" formatted for geeks, and is great for easing the burden of content creation.

however My mom (and I imagine any non-geek) would have trouble reading the hyperlink format, and be completely confused by the strong vs italics, code, or block quote sections of Markdown.

ronaldx• 12 years ago

I guess the only downside is that if your client has NoScript, they just see the raw Markdown.

Correct, which is pretty awful.

But, curiously, 100% better than any other 'static site' solution I've seen here.

scorpion032• 12 years ago

Static Site Generators seem like the Twitter client of today (which itself has been the "Hello, World!" of Web 2.0)

Here is a site that compares 270 of them: http://staticsitegenerators.net/

dangoor• 12 years ago

Most (all?) of those 270 static site generators generate HTML files that sit on disk on the server. This tool takes markdown files with a single script tag and serves that up to the client. While I'm pretty sure I've seen this idea before, it is at least different from the typical static site generator.

p4bl02• 12 years ago

Many static site generators use (or allow you to use) markdown to write your pages, and then generate static html from it. And I can only see benefits to the no-javascript approach.

exizt882• 12 years ago

$then = "email" + "@" + "davidpennington.me"

Is this supposed to be PHP or Javascript?

Xeoncross5• 12 years ago

So here is my dilemma. I wanted to write it in Javascript, but the "then" looked lonely without some kind of starting context. I was going to write it in Go, but "var then..." kind of messed up the sentence. So I wrote it in PHP since everyone knows what that horrible $ is all about.

exizt882• 12 years ago

'.' is the proper string concatenation operator in PHP.

partomniscient• 12 years ago

If there's javascript in the output, it's not really static is it?

k__2• 12 years ago

Well, you can deploy it with a simple web server. No server side processing.

Theoretically this is the best scaling solution.

Practically it makes the site slower for every client.

TheHydroImpulse• 12 years ago

That's the whole point of every static site generator. It's pretty absurd that people see this as "web scale" versus other static site generators.

Theoretically and practically, this isn't the best scaling solution. One shouldn't even talk about scaling in that sense for mere blog posts and such.

Another issue is the fact that your SEO will be greatly impacted. They don't execute (last I heard) JavaScript. Links and such will go to waste.

While I'm a big proponent of client-side SPAs, only when they are appropriate -- can I emphasis this more? Blogs or static sites are not appropriate for this.

HeyImAlex• 12 years ago

Theoretically this is the best scaling solution.

Html markup on your pages is probably minuscule after compression (you're using zopfli with 5000 cycles and minifying your html, right?), and amortizing the upfront cost of that extra js over the average number of page views is definitely worse than plain ol static html for your blog 99.9% of the time.

But let's get real; theoretically the best? I doubt markdown is even near the optimum in terms of bits on the wire. Don't even talk to me unless you're writing your own binary markdown serialization format.

dwg2• 12 years ago

While you can deploy it with a simple web server, it may not always be the best scaling solution. Consider a website built with true "built" static sites, which do not load any javascript. They make only one request to the web server where as jr makes two on the initial load (and again on each page, though cache helps here significantly).

JasonFruit• 12 years ago

Using Google Chrome Version 34.0.1847.132 on Linux, if I open pages (e.g. http://xeoncross.github.io/jr/, http://xeoncross.github.io/jr/john1.html) in a new tab that is not immediately focused, they never visibly render. I see that frequently with client-side-rendered pages.

atmosx2• 12 years ago

I'm fine with octopress but if I had to change to another static site generator I'd probably go with 'Go' due to speed improvements.

sch1zo• 12 years ago

Honest question why would you care about the speed of a static site generator? As long as it generates the site in a reasonable time I'm fine with it.

spf13• 12 years ago

Hugo is a fully featured SSG written in Go. It's considerably faster than other SSGs and has a very easy installation.

http://hugo.spf13.com

atmosx2• 12 years ago

I know spf13 :-), that's what I had in mind.

notJim• 12 years ago

I was hoping this was going to be a generator that generates static site generators, since they seem to be the hot new project.

s_m• 12 years ago

This is cool. I value pageload speed though, so I wouldn't use this myself.

michaelbuckbee• 12 years ago

While not what I'd do for every site, it's a pretty neat tool for some use cases.

In particular, Heroku has moved to a similar setup with Boomerang [1] - a JS include that puts the nice Heroku branding at the top of your add-on configuration pages.

It neatly sidesteps the need to make a component/template for every single framework and backend in use by their different partners.

I could also see it being useful as an easy "drop in" way of tying the branding+nav together on a number of different sites within an organization (so your auto generated docs, your tutorials, etc all live on different systems but easily look the same).

1 - https://github.com/heroku/boomerang

nir• 12 years ago

Neat idea. Is the "Download Jr" part required, or could it just be included from GH pages of the original repo?

Could make for a very quick & simple way to put up some content online while keeping it looking decent, and users could contribute new themes etc.

dyadic• 12 years ago

I think the idea is pretty neat, but the flash of unstyled content before the js kicks in really ruins it for me.

dwg2• 12 years ago

Neat idea for very small, quick and dirty sites.

Pros:

* No build process (yet), source == build & no need for dev server * Easy to integrate client specific code (e.g. browser compatibility)

Cons:

* How to transpile to CSS/JS? * Apples-to-apples, slower than static sites with "build" process * SEO?

TBD:

* Client processing speed

Istof2• 12 years ago

This is a great idea that might be useful on free hosts that only allow static pages but I don't think that I would use it otherwise.

Istof2• 12 years ago

I would be curious to see what other uses it has

ClashTheBunny• 12 years ago

I would wrap the markdown in a gigantic < pre > so that when noscript is enabled, you end up seeing at leat markdown, and not a wall of letters.

As for advantages of this, it seems like it would be better for a more open web. If you put this on the web, it doesn't matter where you serve it from, I can send you really good well formed patches. On thing the web currently lacks is the ability to participate at a web scale. If I see something that I can improve and can get to the source, I'll send a patch or pull request. These days 'view source' means 'view generated code that nobody has seen'. This gets back to the roots of the web.

chenster• 12 years ago

Do we really need this level of overly extreme optimizing? Today's modern Web browsers are already doing the most layout and rendering with CSS plus CDN and client side cache.

zhte415• 12 years ago

I have had a, static, static site generator for many years. It is called gedit. I've heard Notepad++ is pretty good too.

mplewis2• 12 years ago

This is a fantastic little toy project! Thanks for showing me. I'm thinking about building this into something for hosting on servers with extremely limited CPU, such as an RPi.

SimeVidas• 12 years ago

That demo looks amazing w/o JavaScript: http://i.imgur.com/sgC4sdN.png (</sarcasm>). Adding JavaScript as a SPOF cannot be a good approach -.-

motyar• 12 years ago

All we need is browsers that support and render Markdown.

Good work !!

anon4• 12 years ago

At first I balked because I positively hate frivolous use of javascript and in fact browse with noscript and only a few sites allowed, but then I realised something.

This is actually really good for people like me. If I visit with javascript disabled, I get a nice, readable markdown. If I visit with lynx, I get markdown. I can actually read your blog with curl, if I want to. This is pretty much the holy grail of graceful degradation right here.

juanuys• 12 years ago

Broken? "curl -i http://xeoncross.github.io/jr/" Content-Type: text/html.

Show HN: The static, static site generator

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