on use of developer tooling (dx)

[xynydev]

This website seems to be currently 100% hand-crafted HTML without any developer / build tooling to ease the process. A manual approach has the possibility to work well for a small website, and I do get the desire to keep the process as lean as possible.

However, there are a few issues this decision causes. For example, the footer on each page has to be updated manually every time it is updated. Additionally, including libraries as static .min.js files in the source tree introduces the possibility of missing updates with criticical fixes, and makes the managing of JS dependencies more manual.

I think it would be more fitting with our core value of "Automation over process" to introduce a tool into the project that allows the use of HTML templating. Also the managing of JS dependencies could be made better using a package manager, but a CDN would be another viable choice if the use of npm were to be indesirable.

I see at least two ways to approach this issue, both of the utilizing an SSG:

• Using a JavaScript-based SSG framework with npm
  • Solves package management and templating in one go.
  • My favorite framework in this category would be Astro, but other options exist too.
• Using a minimal SSG without JS dependencies and deciding on some non-npm way of managing JS dependencies.
  • The classic templating syntax that doesn't look like custom HTML tags is more clunky in my opinion, but this would create a smaller JS depency.
  • This would likely require making content Markdown.
  • Some frameworks available in this category are Hugo and Zola.

Some linting or formatting would also be nice, but that's probably not a priority. I also don't agree with the usage of JQuery, as most features it's commonly used for are available and as easy to use with JS DOM functions, but switching off would require some code rewriting...

Edit: It seems that the libraries are already pulled in from CDN, but the libraries are just left in js/, so they should just be removed from there.