[bryanlarsen]

You could use server side includes instead, which have been a feature of web servers for about 20 years now...

[icebraining]

Not if you host on S3, for example.

[TheZenPsycho]

A legitimate problem we're solving by… inventing a new templating language.

Did we need a new one to do this? Absolutely none of the hundreds of existing languages could have possibly worked, so let's reinvent SSI with different syntax?

[mehulkar]

Or on brace.io (aka Dropbox)

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Then just web spider SSI running on a local server.

Or someone should write an SSI static site generator.

[oneeyedpigeon]

A fine line, but static pages will be slightly faster than SSI.

Edit: Although what would be really nice would be the same kind of pre-processor that works with apache ssi directives

[TheZenPsycho]

mod_disk_cache and mod_mem_cache make that pretty irrelevant.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_disk_cache.html

re:edit hxincl uses a similar style as ssi but with a couple of enhancements:

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/en/man1/hxincl.1....

if you want exactly SSI syntax, ain't nuthin' stopping you from pointing curl at localhost.

[mantrax2]

They'll be infinitesimal faster for the server which will sit idle most of the time anyway... and much slower for you when you make a minor header/footer mod locally, and then you need to re-upload all pages that have a header (i.e. all pages).

I'm sorry, but this project feels more like "art" than a practical tool.

Plus, with a few basic lines of PHP (available on every shared host) you can pre-generate your site statically as well (and on the server, to save you the re-uploading).

[oneeyedpigeon]

Presumably the 're-upload all pages' bit can be automated. As far the reset, the trade-off depends on how often you're updating content versus the amount of traffic coming to your site; in many cases, a tiny saving on frequently-occurring page delivery is well worth a big delay on one-off page generation.

[TheZenPsycho]

So basically, we've gone down a path of solving problems we've created ourselves.

[eevee]

rsync will easily handle a few lines changed in a large number of files.

Or you could just, y'know, run the static site generator on the server. What Linux doesn't have Python installed?

[TheZenPsycho]

or you could just, 'y'know, run SSI. what web server doesn't have SSI? What problem are we actually solving here?

[YuriNiyazov]

Serving pure HTML files off S3 is pretty popular. No SSI there.

[TheZenPsycho]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7432097 also, which is it. are we on s3 or on a linux server with python?

[eevee]

nginx?

[TheZenPsycho]

http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_ssi_module.html

[nawitus]

>and much slower for you when you make a minor header/footer mod locally, and then you need to re-upload all pages that have a header

You should automate that with Grunt or Gulp. Static .html pages is best practise these days instead of dynamic templating.

[ollysb]

It's best practice to not use the term "best practice" these days ;) (sorry, couldn't resist)