when you tell me to use a static site generator that can’t do a basic fucking comments section without pulling in a stack of JavaScript, all I hear is fap fap fap fap
when you tell me to use react for anything at all, the noise gets louder
XFEDI
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it’s very easy to do better than PHP
the system I designed works across languages, and I’ve implemented it across languages, and one day I should write it up as a spec and publish an implementation
but there’s really not much to doing better than PHP. you want:
- structural templating
- the ability to drive the templating engine as either a static page compiler or as a server, with a nice API to choose which one a page ends up as
- static output that a reverse proxy can serve as a sensible path, with a fallback to the server for anything that’s not static
- extremely optionally, support for one of the lightweight partial render libraries so that clients with JavaScript get a speedup (and clients without JavaScript just get a regular site, magic!) and no more JavaScript than that