A place for everything about web development

Is it a good thing for developing fast mobile pages? Or yet another Google gimmick that will disappear in 3 years?

Here is the picture of the effect.

I would pay for source of all the weird site stuff Gwern has commissioned / developed over the years. I am never sure how much of it it's worth it to emulate in my own site; for instance, cool sidenotes of the kind he and tufte-css have wouldn't fall back as neatly for text-only browsers as the stuff I have now. (counterpoint: I am pretty sure I'm the only person I know to have visited my site with a text-only browser)

Probably better to focus on my content, but by gosh it's cool to see people making this stuff happen.

Recently in a chatroom I know people have been discussing using HTML and CSS only without any kind of other markup / templating / build script.

I am not into it.

I do wish there were a better way to define my own mini-extensions to markdown to have the markdown be the properly Canonical form of my content; I have an oembed liquid tag and a linkpreview liquid tag and ideally that'd just be a presentation detail rather than embedded within my markup with liquid... but as it is, I'm quite happy with the flexibility Jekyll gives me given that even my weirdest stuff is easy to express as "turn some markdown into a chunk of html and put that html into a different piece of html" (yes you can see some poorly rendered markdown there, no I do not care enough to fix it)

Make your website PWA (Progressive Web Application)

Hnews has already gotten into how this isn't really a jamstack issue, just an issue with a 100% static site.

While the piece is kind of flawed, it made me realize that the people arguing "well at that point why not just use a CMS" miss what I like about my site. I use Horst Gutmann's webmentiond, which I run myself. It's webmentions so not exactly comments, but everything about comments applies. I could have all the static content in an S3 bucket; I don't, because for right now it's just as easy to serve out myself. However, the static site with a comment system tacked on is nice because there is perfect separation of concerns: webmentiond manages and stores the data for those comments, and on my site I only have to futz around with the display of that data. This is something that for everything I hated about disqus comments, they got right: you just plugged them in.

I wonder what else that comes packaged Out Of The Box with Wordpress could be nice as its own little module for a static site.