Damn. What alternatives does HN recommend?

pousada 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

HTML.

Unironically have been migrating my static pages (from Nextjs and Eleventy) to plain HTML and love it. Of course depends on your use case if that is feasible.

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azangru 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Plain html has two things going against it.

First, it doesn't have any provisions for code reuse. So, if you have multiple pages that use the same header, same footer, or same navigation menu, your options are either to copy-paste it (gross), or to build the final html out of smaller pieces, at which point you've reinvented either a static site generator or a web server.

Second, if you write long stretches of text, the html markup can get in the way, as opposed to unobtrusiveness of something like markdown.

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pousada 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yea I think I’ll write my own static generator that just combines 3 templates for header/body/footer and converts markdown from the body. Should be fun project.

I’m tired of the constant update pressure from existing solutions and I only need something dead simple.

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H1Supreme 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> at which point you've reinvented either a static site generator ...

It doesn't have to be Astro though. You can build something super simple that just includes the header, footer, and nav. Leaving most of the site as plain HTML.

	▲	azangru 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes; that's Eleventy. Or Hugo. Or Jekyll. They are extremely simple, without the bells and whistles of Astro.

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pjmlp 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Or I don't know, use WebComponents.

	▲	azangru 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		How would this help? You would want your header render on the server, wouldn't you? Not to incur a CLS penalty, right? How does a web component help in this scenario?

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jrnichols 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Same, and I was starting to feel kind of strange doing anything in html/php in 2026 but then I looked at everything else and realized I'd have to start from scratch again. Plain ol' HTML has worked great.

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evantbyrne 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I experimented a lot with bootstrapping React projects this past fall, and Astro was by far the least painful to use. Notably, it was the least goofy of all of the React starter kits to use for server API development.

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pjmlp 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Mastering HTML, CSS and vanilajs.

Then one is pretty much safe from framework tides.

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hydroxideOH- 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I recently rebuilt my site with Parcel + React Server Components. RSC are designed to solve many of the same problems that Astro does. And Parcel is “just” a bundler and not a framework, so it has less magic and gives you more control.

https://micahcantor.com/blog/rsc-rewrite.html

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porker 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://lume.land/ a good, straightforward SSG.

There's one other I've seen recently that looked good but I have misplaced the link

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arcanemachiner 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well, there's this other project that recently secured funding from a company that has a proven track record of supporting great open-source projects like Astro, TanStack, and Hono without trying to capture or lock anything down.

There's even an article about it somewhere.

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azangru 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Eleventy, of course :-)

But why are you looking for alternatives already?

	▲	throwawa71973 14 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Dropped eleventy recently. Disliked the templating solutions, the messy documentation, the loss in momentum, and liked a lot of the stuff (especially the tooling and principles) in astro. Also strongly disliked how political eleventy got. I just wanted a website, not a an internal debate about what I am potentially being absorbed into. I can vote, and spend money on donations, I don't need to enact change through my tech stack.
	▲	jcmfernandes 14 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I'm not! Just preparing myself for the worst-case scenario and creating some bookmarks meanwhile.

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gulugawa 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Vite. https://codeberg.org/createthirdplaces/frontend/src/branch/m...