What framework(s) are people using for developing more robust (static) websites?

[eezstreet]

I am looking more seriously into developing a NeoCities page using static HTML, but I'd like to have some elements of it be automatically generated prior to it being pushed onto my page. Think stuff like "this page was last generated on XYZ date".

Are there any scriptable HTML preprocessors out there? What I'd really like to see is a kind of framework that lets me define custom HTML tags, like '<Header />' for example and have some kind of program replace that tag with another blob of HTML (instead of using an iframe or something similar). Or in a more complex example, I can make a tag like '<GitLastModifiedCommitDate>' which would tell me the last time that a commit was made that edited this file. Under the hood, it would probably just invoke something like 'git blame <file>' and do some complex piping with 'sed'.

I know a lot of people in this scene are using Jekyll, but I've never really been fond of Python syntax, and the hamfisting of it into HTML seems like it has the potential to make tooling rather bad. Speaking somewhat from experience with other HTML templating libraries like Svelte and React, the integration with VSCode always felt like I was smacking into rakes over and over. I would rather keep things more simple and use natural HTML tags, because at the end of the day, it's just HTML that I'd be writing.

Some other nice-to-have features would be the ability to blog via Markdown files.

My eventual, hair-brained goal here is to have this preprocessing step be run as part of a CI/CD pipeline in something like GitHub or GitLab and automatically push stuff out onto NeoCities whenever I make a commit.

I could just write all of this myself, but I really wanted to focus on content instead of tooling.

[fizzylimesoda]

most people does not use frameworks to develop websites because

• most people around the web revival community are not developers
• websites with frameworks usually load slowly or don't absolutely load either because of connection problems or that the site is being loaded on an outdated browser and/or os

the closest thing i can recommend though is jquery

[Kallistero]

If you want an HTML component processor that isn't pushing a mess of JavaScript right onto the page itself, it almost makes me think of HTMX or a ShadCN version for HTML, like FrankenUI 

For a pipeline from a code repo to Neocities, it can be as simple as using a git hook with a Neocities CLI command, but you could also use the "Deploy to Neocities" Github Action with a Github secret set in your repo so it can just log in for you without exposing your details or requiring a pre-login for your hook.

And yes, for the initial question of what framework people are using, people are mostly using vanilla HTML/CSS/JS here. I've seen Svelte and React show up on some static sites before, but they're few & far between. The use of a frontend framework is a predisposition that you can get from formal education or corporate training, and at least right here, a lot of people either don't have that predisposition to begin with (because they aren't formally trained) or we choose to disregard the use of frameworks for a few reasons:

• frameworks suggest particular creative directions when you're designing a site, so maximizing freeform creativity can mean using no pre-made frameworks
• a true "retro" site (or even just an old-browser-compatible site) doesn't use frameworks, since those sites & browsers existed before the widespread support of common frameworks
• if you're an experimentalist, what you learn from using vanilla code is entirely framework agnostic and can therefore give you a lot more bang for your buck, especially since you can use that knowledge across all of your other projects that might use several different frameworks
• you don't need any dedicated environment to write & run simple HTML; you can edit & update your site from any device with the domain login, and you can smoothly port the site over to any other host if that's what you see in the site's future
• the things you write & learn in vanilla code are maximally shareable with other webmasters without being a widespread imperative to create things in a certain way

[eezstreet]

If you want an HTML component processor that isn't pushing a mess of JavaScript right onto the page itself, it almost makes me think of HTMX or a ShadCN version for HTML, like FrankenUI 

For a pipeline from a code repo to Neocities, it can be as simple as using a git hook with a Neocities CLI command, but you could also use the "Deploy to Neocities" Github Action with a Github secret set in your repo so it can just log in for you without exposing your details or requiring a pre-login for your hook.

Yeah, I’m definitely thinking no mess of JavaScript at all. The only JavaScript I would want would be for client purposes, like accordion components and stuff like that.

I was actually thinking it would be an application that could be run to replace some HTML, and this would be run as part of that CI pipeline. The app would spit out new, modified HTML files that I could preview by just opening them with my browser. So it’s all just a static page.

I haven’t looked too deeply into HTMX but I have heard of it.

[candycanearter07]

I personally think jekyll is simple enough to make a basic website, its really well designed