I've been maintaining my personal website as plain HTML for five years now. I must say, I quite like this method. There's no substitute for practice when it comes to maintaining your skills at editing HTML and CSS.

Yes, you must copy and paste content and not having layout page is annoying at times. But the overhead of just doing it yourself is surprisingly small in terms of the time commitment.

Typically, I'll draft a post in MS Word then open the git repo for my site, hosted on github pages, duplicate and rename the template.html page that includes the CSS, footer, and header for my site and then copy my content into it. When I'm happy with everything, I'll make my commit and then a minute later it's live at my custom domain. Seeing that it takes only 11KBs and 26ms to load my landing page strangely delightful.

There's a lot you can do with just plain html these days if you just need a clean site. Here's an example from my recipe site (https://xilic.com/recipia/sauces/pesto_traditional.html), mostly for my personal use or sharing with friends, with only html/css. It has expandable boxes, a menu system, etc. A simple script converts a directory structure of .csv files to these recipe cards with a template, and this way you can edit the sources in a spreadsheet and then the publish script just takes whatever is new and re-does the whole lot of html as necessary. Just like we used to do with Apache Forest!

Did he reinvent a static-site generator? Markdown, pandoc, makefile... Sounds like a job for hugo/eleventy/jekyll/whatever.

I started a portfolio website with Netlify (iirc), then I moved to Vue + Gridsome (on GitHub pages), then Next.js with Tailwind CSS, and was about to move to Vite.js over winter break.

That's 4 stacks over the course of 5-6 years. Not worth it.

Decided to do the sensible thing and use GitHub's README functionality. I prefer this approach and wish more folks in the tech community adopted it: https://github.com/SuboptimalEng

Good on ya! HTML+JS is plenty performant for a blog and I'm always happy to see more people eschewing frameworks when they're not necessary.

I've been writing a progressive web app that is, itself, a "web component" (custom element), built entirely with custom elements, so I feel like I've got a pretty good idea of how you can tackle that header reuse bullet point. Happy to give pointers if you're interested in that at all.

Anyway, great job on simplifying things! I hope it gets easier from here!

The website of one of the most influential IT person, who won the court battle against U.S. Government, allowing for widespread cryptography, professor Daniel J. Bernstein, is and always has been plain HTML mostly with no CSS.

https://cr.yp.to/

It's served using his own HTTP server - publicfile, and the DNS domain is served using his own DNS server - djbdns. E-mail is handled using his own SMTP server - qmail. He invented the Maildir e-mail format, de facto standard in all e-mail products. All e-mail mailing lists for his products are handled by his own mailing list server - ezmlm. All of this is managed using his replacements to /etc/rc or /etc/init.d or systemd - daemontools.

He invented ChaCha and Salsa stream ciphers, now in widespread use, as well as elliptic curves, especially the famous Curve25519, and the Poly1305 MAC.

He also invented TCP SYN cookies.

Pretty impressive, no?

I'm surprised to not see Astro mentioned, its whole schtick is providing very similar DX to frameworks like SvelteKit except in a way that's geared towards generating plain HTML/CSS with zero JS by default. You get things like components with scoped styles but they are compiled down to nothing. It's really a breath of fresh air.

Hugo worked for me. And as part of the GitHub pipeline that builds the site and deploys it I can grab some ‘dynamic’ content (from a Notion DB) and render it. Subsequently I added Zapier so that when the Notion DB changes it triggers the pipeline to update my website. The only thing I pay for is the web hosting with dreamhost.

https://www.planetjones.net/blog/03-05-2023/relaunching-my-p...

I have found someone who uses the anchor suffix to solve the problem:

https://john-doe.neocities.org/

I am not html expert, so I have no idea how complicate or what implications would that have.

I write my website and blog directly and entirely in HTML using BBEdit. For me, this is just much easier than any other method. I don't have to rely on any external system.

I also decided to develop my personal website in plain HTML. I looked into a bunch of static site generators and found that direction to be too complicated and slow for me.

I still wanted the ability to have a common headers and footers and unique sections without repeating myself in every file. So I created a very small PHP application (just 5 files) and each page or blog post is a single PHP file in a directory. These PHP files have a small bit of metadata code at the top but are otherwise just plain HTML files. In each directory is layout file that wraps the content and these nest up the directory structure. So my site has a common header and footer and each section has their own subheader.

With the ability to publish by git push to the server, writing a blog post is as easy as creating a new file, git commit, and git push.

Hugo is also nice for this, and allows for markdown, embedding Mathjax or LaTeX, etc. Your minimal approach mirrors some of what I've seen in Hugo or Astro, and I'm all for it. I wish we had truly minimalist SSGs, I think the idea has a lot of purchase.

With regard to templating approaches, my favorite by a very wide margin is to simply use string interpolation in the base language.

You create a common template type with methods like:

  LayoutHtml(Session? Session, string title, string innerHtml, ...) => $@"
  <html>
  (common elements)
  {innerHtml}
  (common elements)
  </html>";

I decided to do write from scratch for my own site, and found that a real burden was maintaining lists of pages: there was no framework helping me out, and every time I added a new page I had to remember to go update my list of blog posts in the 2 or 3 pages I could access it from.

To solve that and other issues, like adding an rss feed and letting pages specify their own publish date, I did what anyone would do: write a custom web server. It's up at https://github.com/playtechnique/andrew/, if anyone wants to give it a whirl.

When I used to do interviews to frontend developers I often had them write a form with validation...in plain HTML and a sprinkle of js for some of the final validation touches.

Was kinda surprised at how many senior leetcode blackbelts didn't know HTML had built in validation :)

JS was required for some of the more complex validation logic and mounting few dom nodes (and again, surprisingly, many didn't know how to create an element and mount it!).

On the other hand I got to learn lots of nice tricks to complete some of the features (elements had to appear with conditional logic) with CSS only which was nice.

Why on earth would you use something like sveltekit in the first place for such a simple website?

I know people will say for the learning experience but learning what? How to basically "hello, world" in sveltekit?

What I like to do:

- have HTML files for the individual pages/posts (I like the freedom that custom HTML provides)

- have a script file consisting just of a single array of meta data blocks for the individual posts (headline, description, preview image(s), date, tags, additional assets to load, like additional CSS or JS, if required, restricted visibility, etc. – most of this is optional) and content for the preview

- a server-side template script that generates the chrome around an individual page view and a paginated list view from the feed data (this allows for things like pagination, cross-links, filters per tag, we can generate multiple views), and we can also generate a RRS feed from the feed-index. Moreover, as there is also no external input other than fragments from the request URI, which can be laundered easily (e.g., by discarding all non alpha-numeric characters) and checked for resolving to existing file paths in given constraints, this should be also considerably secure. (This is actually a rather short script.)

- a server config (`.htaccess` or similar) that parses parts of the request URL to parameters to be used by the template script.

(So, adding a post is as simple as adding a new HTML file, copying an entry in the feed file and modifying it accordingly for the new page. And it can be done all in a text editor. The only thing missing may be a full-text search, as there is no DB involved and no representation of the content as normalized plain text. On the other hand, this also keeps the server load low.)

Lots of people saying they did something similar, so I'll add that I also did something similar for learning / fun(?) with the added wrinkle that it runs on a raspberry pi at my house. I used golang's Fiber to serve the html/css. Fiber comes with some built-in templating as well to help with the layout. https://www.ianmyjer.com/content/homelab.md

I have a pretty elaborate Hakyll site with custom routers and all kinds of junk (https://dpitt.me), but it's an old site that started as Django, then I built it from scratch with Sinatra, and then was Jekyll for years. There really is something special about a well-organized static site. For all the rewrites of this old thing, I can't imagine moving away from static site generation.

As others have said, you are reinventing the Static Site Generator. I would strongly urge you to look into those.

If you know Python well enough, my recommendation is Pelican.[1] You can author your posts in Markdown. You specify the desired HTML/CSS. It will then do all the boring work for you. Then just upload the static files to a webserver.

[1] https://getpelican.com/

Hi. The blog looks good. A few things to make it better:

1) You can use watchexec https://watchexec.github.io/ to live reload during development. 2) Also, please add a clickable image preview (you can use this lib for example https://github.com/francoischalifour/medium-zoom) 3) No commenting feature, luckily I found your post here on HN. But it would be better to have comment blocks, like from https://giscus.app/ or just a link where readers can comment. 4) No RSS feed. I'd like to subscribe to your updates, but there is no such option right now. RSS is one of the points why site generators are used for static blogs (e.g. Hugo, Zola, Astro, etc.)

> My project tree got a lot simpler and the only Javascript on the site now is to highlight code.

You can do away with the JS with something like Pandoc Highlight Filter: https://gitlab.com/danbarry16/pandoc-highlight-filter

Just take the Python file, make it executable and add it to the filter arguments. It's very basic, but all done during build time. It was originally started to build out HTML documentation for a system that was very particular about what types of files could be used.

It can also do other stuff like build your site with Python blocks that are run: https://gitlab.com/danbarry16/pandoc-highlight-filter/-/blob...

In 1995, I started with a personal website based on HTML. Since then, I have added a little bit of CSS to the home page, but all the other files are in plain HTML. For that reason it looks very old school, but that is okay with me.

I have been adding some JavaScript through the years. Some for generating content, some for graphics and animations. I also have written a C program for checking the HTML and all the internal links and the use of tags. The program places all updated files into a folder ready for upload with FTP.

To edit the HTML, I use an editor (based on Crystal Edit) that also can navigate HTML files: when pressing F5 on a link, it opens the file in the editor (or in the default browser when it is an external link), and if there a tag in the link, positions the cursor at that line.

See for more details: https://www.iwriteiam.nl/SiteMain.html

Nice job! If only HTML had a serious templating system(no the template tag isn’t enough) that could be used without JavaScript, we won’t need any 3rd party system for assembling static sites. For example a mechanism for including partials with the <link> tag and refer them inside a <template> or directly into current html

Plain HTML and CSS personal site experience can be vastly improved by using server side includes. Your webserver's SSI module is likely just the right amount of templating power so you don't have to re-write the same HTML in $x spots with a minimal attack surface and maintenance burden. SSI hasn't changed in 20 years and the nginx module at least hasn't even ever had a cve.

    <!--# include file="/menu.html" -->
    ...
    <!--# include file="/footer.html" -->

A few years ago, me and a coworker redid our company's website in straight-up HTML, JS, and CSS without a framework. It was quite refreshing but it certainly took longer to complete it all. It had 3D models and some scroll-based masking on videos and such.

It has sadly been replaced by a website made in Framer due to time constraints, but the old version is on the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20211008131609/https://tonari.no...

Unfortunately it kinda turned into a flickery mess, not sure if that's an old bug of ours or something failing to load properly from the archive. Oh well!

I took a similar approach, but I still have a dynamic site generator that reads my HTML content and outputs it to a template. I write all of my pages as stand-alone HTML, and each page can render on its own without any of the template being present. For example:

https://parkscomputing.com/page/conways-game-of-life

Is supported underneath by the raw HTML:

https://parkscomputing.com/content/conways-game-of-life.html

The menu and main page are controlled by a JSON configuration.

The site is slow right now because I'm being stingy on the Azure storage performance.

Glad to hear you migrated to plain HTML and CSS, I think this creates a healthier environment: it removes bloat and is more efficient.

My question is how do you update your feed, sitemap and other stuff?

I've been doing it by shell scripts, I'm not 100% satisfied, I also create gemini pages from HTML, which changes content a lot.

Another question: how do you handle comments to your posts?

Because my blog is a static site, so there is no processing on the server end, and I don't want third parties to handle this. What I've done is adding a handler to my mail server, so it writes the mail sent to articles to the right place. And the HTML uses an <object> to load them. I don't like it either, but works. Any suggestions for this things?

Thanks!

Before

> Why? It took me hours of Googling

After

> How? I spent some time looking around for guides or a “canonical” way of doing this and found that there isn’t really one.

Sounds like no benefit in reducing the costs to achieve a less functional site (see next steps, which would require more googling)

> It took me hours of Googling and trying out different options to come up with this awful piece of code that worked to load the contents of a file and give them to my page [CODE]

Do I have Stockholm syndrome or is the code here completely fine?

I am falling back to 'plain and simple' in the world of web applications (or a website)

While I am a programmer, I will continue to write code that injects html text with another... like a layout having a title and body html, etc.

I certianly limit my client-side codebase. Most of my javascript code is really focused on GUI/UI, even if I have to use a specific library. I dont bother with React or the like.

I will use htmx if I want to do partial updates. Other pages might be a tad more complicated if fetching data from SQL. However, I also have pages that are SIMPLY HTML+CSS!!

As I say - plain and simple.

I also created something similar in PHP + Apache rewrites.

I already had a PHP website, and I wanted to add a simple blog system to it, but most suggestions were complex systems that required installation.

I created a .htaccess file and some PHP files to load and display markdown files from the /posts folder.

It doesn't require installation (just copy-paste the files and you have a blog), and no database (posts are simply the markdown files).

https://github.com/Cristy94/markdown-blog

I think PhpStorm/WebStorm has LiveReload built into it. It's been years since I've used it since I don't usually write plain HTML/CSS. But it was just a button click away IIRC. You shouldn't need to restart any servers no matter what you do anyway, just press F5. Still not hard.

I use PHP+Twig on my simple websites just so I don't have to copy-paste the header/footer/nav. It's still incredibly simple, very close to HTML+CSS and no build times. You can FTP upload your files if you want it works.

I cheat with my site.

I write the site in markdown in an html file.

I then include the link for Markdeep (https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/)

Page goes to user, markdeep does all the processing and I'm good to go. The minifed java script file is about 300kb, the size of an image.

I do mostly the same, .md and pandoc, but also mo for templating:

https://github.com/tests-always-included/mo.

Took just a few minutes to setup. E.g. https://afarah.info/public/blog/awsv3/index.html.

Writing in Markdown with {{mustache}} templates for DRY is very satisfying, a simple bash script renders it. Looks good on my phone even.

I did kinda the same thing. Not being a backend dev didn't stop me using some PHP, basically as template language. It has a few downsides as well, but overall I am happy with it.

Funny how things like ESI/SSI would make such pages very easy to prepare and serve, but we switched to whole V8 engine to render HTML from almost-HTML syntax :)

Recently redesigned my site [1] and used nextjs app router (moved from page router).

The new paradigm of adding “use server”, “use cache”, and “use client” felt too magical by default.

Server actions are easy to forget adding validation and proper access control on. You need an external library to avoid the common pit falls.

I’ve been contemplating whether to move to something simple. The complexity creep is real.

1] https://saksham.work

To contribute to the authors open questions at the bottom: for reusability, use web components [1] and for hot reload use a file watcher with a websocket, or just lean on your ide if possible (e.g. jetbrains).

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_compone...

> More code duplication. SvelteKit has a component system so I could make my navigation bar as a component and reuse it.

I'm no front-end developer by any means, but arent native web components a thing now ?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_compone...

> spending too much time on Hacker News gave me the misconception that writing a website using plain HTML and CSS would be a relatively well-paved path in 2025. I spent some time looking around for guides or a “canonical” way of doing this and found that there isn’t really one.

I had this exact same surprise last year! For whatever reason, there really isn't any sort of standard way of creating a vanilla site in 2025!

That is exactly the setup I use for my website, but I need javascript for mathjax to compile latex. Some people told me I should do it "server-side", which I presume means precompile latex and serve the equations as inline images(?) but I haven't figured out how to do it. looks around

I write on index.html and when the month is done it turns into month.html linked below the content on the current index.html - anything more complex is a Jekyll project sans plugins and without sass or JavaScript. but I have the emacs

I'm using PHP includes and don't think I have any JS besides Matomo tracking. I just read that I can use <object> for those includes now, so I can drop another layer of complexity.

The only thing I have is a blog post navigator, that shows you all blog posts besides the current one.

What resource is good for gaining a deep and comprehensive knowledge of html for someone already familiar with html, like, having-written-Angular/JavaScript/jQuery-level familiar? Consider CSS to be out of scope of this question as it is a different beast on its own.

Love this. Building a website this way really teaches you why we started having all the complexities in web frameworks today. For certain simple websites like this one, the tradeoffs are worth it. I rebuilt our company website this way too. (Sescollc.com)

pandoc for the win. I use to convert my md resume into doc/pdf whatever.

Writing your own static site generator is good for you. I'm using raw Jinja2 templates and a tiny python script to do my shared header/styles etc. Outside of that it's all shell scripts and raw HTML/CSS.

You might find Teeny (https://github.com/yakkomajuri/teeny) interesting for this.

Something I built to have my own site in static HTML and CSS.

The best thing about this post to me was the screenshot of the directory organization. It’s the little things like this that making thinking “how to start” a matter of “where could I start”.

hello,

as always: imho.

ad "duplicated (html) code" in static webpages:

back in the 1990ties when a lot of people wrote html by hand, there was a thing called "server side includes" ...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes

or just use some "ubiquitous" script-language like php for this simple task of orchestrating/including snippets/components of code etc. :)

just my 0.02€

The CSS for this site (root.css) is beautifully simple! The colors, spacing, and fonts are very comfy - this is exactly the look I'd want for my blog.

> the only Javascript on the site now is to highlight code

Couldn't the code highlighting be also handled statically during the build process?

There is a tool called entr, it kill and restart command when any file changes are detected, you could check it out.

FWIW I just import a canned CSS theme (Terminal CSS), MathJax, and the roll the rest in raw HTML;

it’s simple and maintainable.

Hey, Query [1] creator here. The article raised some exciting challenges. With Query, we solve booth downsides mentioned in it. To keep things simple, we use EventSource for live reloading [2] and JSX Server-Side Rendering [3] for those who want component reuse in the server. It's just JSX with some helpful extras. I'm happy to elaborate on the technical decisions if anyone's curious.

A couple of days ago, I wrote an article about it: https://dev.to/gc-victor/building-static-html-pages-with-jsx...

[1] https://qery.io

[2] https://github.com/gc-victor/query/tree/main/examples/minima...

[3] https://qery.io/docs/modules/function.html#jsx-server-side

How is code syntax highlighting achieved in this context ?

Pandoc really looks like a nice tool

This is exactly how I generate my site[^1]. Except I use a simple Node script to handle hosting a tiny HTTP server.

Node calls pandoc, which converts my markdown into HTML, ESBuild to convert the few JS snippets I run on my site (which I write in TS), and SASS to convert my scss stylesheet into a bundled CSS sheet.

It's super lightweight and I like that I can bend it to do whatever weird shit I want my site to have without relying on a 3rd party static site generator.

[^1]: https://pfy.ch

Here's some of my tips for a handwritten HTML site, since the author wished more tips existed:

- consider using an HTML boilerplate template like this one if you don't know where to start: https://www.matuzo.at/blog/html-boilerplate/

- consider using a CSS template, or a CSS reset, if you don't know where to start with styling. Pico CSS is a good drop-in: https://picocss.com/. Frontend devs always blog about their CSS resets, like this one: https://piccalil.li/blog/a-more-modern-css-reset/. But if you're someone inclined to write their own HTML, then you'll probably also want to write your own CSS. This takes time to learn. Especially learning how to design the page without looking crappy

- I copy my last page as a template whenever writing a new page

- I don't worry about code duplication. If I need to refactor duplicated content, I use search and replace across files in vim (like https://nithinbekal.com/posts/vim-search-replace/). Hopefully your editor/IDE has something similar, and hopefully you're comfortable with regexes

- markdown + pandoc + scripting is a common solution. Technically it's not handwriting HTML at this point -- it's hacking together your own static site generator instead of using an existing framework -- but no biggie

- frontend people have made a lot of live reload tools over time. Here's a couple: https://nitoyon.github.io/livereloadx/ and https://github.com/tapio/live-server. Personally, I've cobbled together something with entr/caddy/websockets/userscripts. I've had problems with `python -m http.server` freezing up occasionally, but YMMV

- About RSS: you can generate your own feed if you already started your own generator script. Personally, I let this tool generate a feed for me in a GitHub Action: https://feed-me-up-scotty.vincenttunru.com/, but the feed quality is meh

- Expect to do a lot of fiddling. You'll reinvent things. You'll lack common features for a while. Embrace this as minimalism. You'll begin to appreciate the tasks that frameworks automate (image optimization, compression, meta tags, validation, etc)

- You'll face growing pains after you cross certain thresholds of page counts. Personally, I'd rather be grug-brained and edit more HTML than figure out some new framework. This is fine for a personal website with a straightforward structure

we need more of this. Thanks for sharing!!

text is not json.