alt Hacker NewsI don't want to shit on this project, because that's not my intent. My biggest gripe with static site generators in general is that for some reason they require the author to write their pages in something other than plain HTML. It's literally a machine-readable format and yet they all want to mix json, yaml, or something with markdown. And "but the output html would overwrite the input html" isn't really an excuse since they all tend to output to a build directory.
And before someone says, "well you can work on your dream static site generator yourself", rest assured, I am, but I'm also very lazy and usually stop once it gets to a "good enough" state for my own use, but isn't quite ready to share with others.
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Forgive my ignorance here but if you want to write HTML then what do you gain from a static site generator?
Couldn’t you just ‘cat’ your templates together with a shell script?
Generally I think you have a point when making landing pages or things of that sort. I however basically only use static site generators for blogging and I think markdown/asciidoc/whatever + metadata is nicer for writing content than directly in HTML.
I made nixtml and I take no offence :)
> My biggest gripe with static site generators in general is that for some reason they require the author to write their pages in something other than plain HTML.
Being the author of KeenWrite, a Markdown editor that uses YAML variables (for content and metadata), I'm biased, but here's my take:
1. Writing <p> tags for every paragraph gets tedious.
2. Markdown is succinct (**bold** vs. <strong>bold</strong>).
3. Content is easier to edit when not surrounded by angle brackets.
4. Content is more robust against markup gaffs (e.g., missing closing tags, tag typos).
5. HTML mixes structural markup with content, making design changes harder.
6. Markdown's simpler format is more portable to other output formats (PDF, ePub).
7. Markdown diffs are easier to review, and likely have fewer merge conflicts.
8. Non-technical contributors are more comfortable with Markdown.
9. Embedding metadata through meta tags is messier and harder to parse using raw HTML.
Here are a couple of blog posts written in Markdown and converted to HTML using my software:
* https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/09/08/feature-matrix/
* https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/10/15/creating-catchy-cover-...
The user manual is a set of Markdown documents converted to PDF (note how the words TeX and ConTeXt and LaTeX are typeset; try to do that with HTML):
* https://keenwrite.com/docs/user-manual.pdf