alt Hacker News> 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):
And this is the other big rub with static site generators... they start off as one person's strong opinions as The Right Way To Do It. And that's fine.
1. Not really 2. Get a better editor 3. Not really, or get a better editor 4. Get a better editor, implement error checking, and use HTML5 5. The idea is to use clean semantic html as the source document and stuff it into a presentation template 6. The source document is clean semantic html 7. Let's be real. 99.99999% of all static site generators are used by one person, generally technically proficient. Merge problems will only happen if you screw up. Also, most modern version control systems aren't storing deltas so merge hell isn't like it was back in the CVS era. 8. Get your non-technical people a better editor 9. Have you explained the quirks of YAML to a non-technical person in one of the Scandinavian countries like Sweden or False? 10. why isn't this formatting properly?