[normloman]

I'm not concerned if a web app or a shopping cart is dynamic. But I see dynamic blogs all the time. Blogs with no comment system, or one that's used infrequently. What's the point of making that dynamic?

While I'm on the subject, can anyone tell me the reasoning behind loading blog content with javascript? I hate when I visit a blog with no script turn on, and get greeted by a blank template. Why does it need javascript to grab the page content?

[jordanlev]

The point of making a blog dynamic is so a non-technical user can easily manage the content via a dashboard. I'm a big fan of static site generators (which is what I presume you're inferring people should use for blogs instead of wordpress et al), but it is silly to think that uploading markdown files to a server is a reasonable workflow for most non-programmers.

As for loading content with javascript -- I totally agree, this bugs the shit out of me. Also, I browse with cookies disabled by default and it is always frustrating when a site that is only serving content doesn't load properly without cookies. wtf?!

[normloman]

I'm not advocating static page generators that use markdown. Far from it. I used to use a blog platform called Movable Type. It was just as easy to use as WordPress but it generated static pages. You'd make changes in the back end, click publish, and Movable Type would generate a new static page to serve up.

You can make WordPress generate static pages too. They have plugins for that.

[jordanlev]

ahh, I see what you mean. Yeah, if you don't have comments or other interactive functionality then generating static pages from your data + templates is great.

That being said, in my experience, most sites have at least some interactivity... even if the primary content isn't. Comments are still pretty standard on most blogs (disqus can be an option, but now you're back to the "why does this require javascript when it doesn't really need to?" problem). Surveys and polls have fallen out of fashion (fortunately), but that's another example. Also, contact forms are a big one (and yeah, there are other options like embedding wufoo or using a form-handling service like Brace Forms, but now we're talking about off-loading a lot of functionality to other services).

As a developer, there are a lot of things about wordpress that I don't like... but I cannot argue that for someone who is not a programmer but likes to tinker, it gives you a ton of functionality out-of-the-box or with plugins. It's the last thing I'd want to use personally, but I think this is the appeal of dynamic sites -- it gives you the flexibility to add all sorts of unrelated crap really easily.

[stevewilhelm]

Six Apart's MovableType is still around.

https://movabletype.org

[sandymcm]

I used MT for years. Versions 4 and 5 had various problems, coincidental with various changes at the parent company, SixApart. (At one time they had three blogging products: Vox, TypePad, and MT.)

I've been searching for a suitable replacement ever since MT 4. I tried to switch to WordPress but hated it. Maybe just preferences, but I've never warmed to WP, in spite of trying each new version that launches.

I see that Byrne Reese, former SixApart employee and co-founder of the MT-based OpenMelody project, is now using Ghost.io for his blog. That's the system I'm testing now as well. (Have used Tumblr in the meantime, with some success.)

[andrewstuart2]

One word: caching.

The more resources you can cache fully (like the template) the fewer round trips you need to make and/or the shorter those round trips become. It's always the latency that slows us down (by definition), which is why even modern processors have sophisticated cache layers and branch prediction. The further from the CPU the resource is, the slower the interaction will be.

This debate is interesting and a bit funny to me because it's very similar to the old dumb terminal vs personal computer debate. We've swung back to the mainframe, except now it's distributed and we call it the cloud.

My prediction (take it or leave it) is that we'll soon be swung all the way back to dynamic client-side sites. And then eventually back to the quantum cloud (heh, "Electron Cloud"). Or something new and more powerful than whatever sits in our pocket or on our desk.

[normloman]

Thanks for answering my question. Would you mind clarifying it for me?

If your blog has a reusable template, wouldn't the images, fonts, and stylesheets that are part of the template get cached on the user's computer, regardless of whether it was dynamic or static?

Or are you talking about caching things serverside?

[Xorlev]

I think he means that you can cache the majority of the page (including the HTML template) and then substitute in just the data (usually coming from JSON). I don't buy that it's more efficient personally. I'd rather resend a lightweight page on every time then force the browser to download it all, load the JS, then build a page and have the browser draw that.

It seems to me that single-page apps are great when you aren't leaving the page and have a lot of navigation, but overkill for a blog.

I am rather interested in react+react-router though. That seems like the best of both worlds -- render serverside, then render deltas clientside.

[klibertp]

There's one technology, available everywhere including most toasters, which allows you to do this (cache HTML template and just substitute the data) and it can work on both back- and frontend with no problems, is crazy fast and even leaves you with something readable when it breaks.

It's called XML with XSLT.

Somehow it isn't very popular. But hey, we got this idea of "rendering pages on the backend or the frontend (or both)" from the same code lately!

[gizzlon]

> It's called XML with XSLT.

But that can only generate XML/XHTML, right?

Also, fast compared to what? Many options are fast if all you do is replacing some values. Static pages can just be written out from memory or disk, a whole nother level of fast :)

[klibertp]

No, XSLT is perfectly capable of generating plain text, which means it can also generate JSON, YAML or what have you. It's true that generating malformed XHTML would be rather hard, though.

As for fast: compared to any other templating engine for server side languages. It was very long ago when I tested this, but for rendering a simple blog page XSLT with lxml (so completely on the C side) was much faster than Jinja2. I suspect only things like Mustache would have a chance here, but then again: XSLT is Turing-complete (probably accidentally, but still).

And that's before taking into account that you don't have to do rendering server-side at all - you can just serve static files and rely on the browser to render them. I don't know if it would be faster than serving static files and rendering with JS, but it has one advantage: it works even for people who have JS disabled.

There are many problems with XSLT, though. XSLT 1.0 is almost unworkable and XSLT 2.0, while specified, is nonexistent: nobody bothered to implement it. Once you start using implementation specific ways of extending it, you lose the benefit of being able to render on a client. Turing completeness can be a trap, too: you can code infinite loop in XSLT, and good luck debugging it (or even recognizing where do you loop in the first place...).

Still, XML and XSLT are a very nice technology, which should be used much more often. The problem, I suspect, is that XML is "yuck" nowadays, which means no one wants to use it, learn it or improve it.

[alexsop2]

I’ve gone down this rabbit hole and aside from fluid navigation, it isn’t worth the hassle. Since the content is largely text which will be transformed into HTML (before or after being sent down the pipe), the size difference is mostly negligible.

Time is better spent cleaning up the critical rendering path, deferring styles and scripts.