Writing HTML is hard

The markup of the web is hard to write. Not hard because it’s complex but because it just is too much to write. It’s verbose. That makes it good for the web but it’s also bad because it’s verbose. It feels like one has to care too much when writing.

The solutions to this verbosity is markdown. Other options do exist but I don’t like them so they don’t exist (shrug). The bridge to get from markdown to HTML in other hand is quite insane. I mean if it’s just markdown to HTML then answer is simple, pandoc.

This starts to fall apart when one desires more. CSS & JS? no worries, just pass it to pandoc and done. That git add . && git commit push to make it live? Just setup github pages to take your processed html and it should be fine. A table of content and index of all the writings? no worries. A janky but easy script to generate the index and then insert it raw into the file.

a script?

This is where I give up as now it’s no longer maintainable or simple (yes. shell scripts or other temporary things are easy but they are not a “simple” solution). Any solution that tries to solve this for you has their own quirks. Since, 2022 I have been using Astro as the solution. Astro is great, it truly feels like an extension of html when setting things up after that its all markdown. But, I am now too tired of it’s quirks.

There might be a lot to hate or love about astro but for me just one issue has made me switch away from it. The GitHub notifications. Every other week I receive a pull request from GitHub’s bot about a new vulnerability in some random dependency of Astro and i should upgrade to fix it.

This is extremely frustrating. I just don’t want to worry about it. One of the primary reasons for choosing Astro was it was easy and whenever if i needed to make rich and dynamic components to integrate with my writings (something akin to Sam Rose’s writings) then with Astro i could do it. But, the notifications has made me reconsider it. I mean, I have written next to nothing in the past two years so, why should i care now. If future me wants to build something like that, future me can worry about it.

For now I have transferred my site from Astro to Zola. So far its fine. No massive dependency, simpler structure and configuration. There is a lot to like about Zola and Zola-like static site generators but, it does feel like a regression in many ways too. For example, The template system is ugly (I dislike all template systems tbh). But, maybe it’s too soon to judge as I was familiar with Astro for a while and I am just not used to Zola’s ways of doing things.

Whatever it is, one thing is certain. Writing HTML is hard.

_{P.S. I have made my astro site public as a template. feel free to use it. However, I will not be updating it and the public preview will be turned off after a while.}