While writing this, I’m watching the presidential debates. It’s funny when the candidates sneak in pitches to visit their website, the one place that tells their story. Not only does that underscore the importance of our field, but also reminds me of the 2012 blog post that got me interested in JAMstack in the first place: Kyle Rush’s
article on moving the Obama campaign’s fundraising platform to Jekyll, and how the performance gains of a static website converted to actual dollars.
All your content is sent twice. First HTML is sent from the server…Then a JavaScript library—plus all your bespoke JavaScript—is loaded. Then all your content is loaded again as JSON…the worst of both worlds: server-side rendering followed by a tsunami of hydration
This is one of the reasons I think a framework like
Svelte is appealing, as it’s much
lighter weight than the others, compiling to vanilla JS. Alas, in most cases I’ve yet to be convinced that anything more than zero is acceptable if you’re not really using it.