Plenty of people have dabbled with “web development” in their own way by learning a bit of HTML and CSS. However, past the basics lies insanity these days. The web is evolving rapidly and to make your website dynamic you use Javascript. In recent years “
the new standard” frameworks have been popping up, React, Vue, etc. they all promise you great ease of development but come at a cost.
- They inject a lot of Javascript into the page, which makes a webpage slow to load for the first time.
- Perhaps more importantly, they have all sorts of new standards you need to adhere to in your code, which can be very daunting for beginners.
If you are building a mostly “static” website and need a bit of interactivity for a date picker for example, why would you include all this bulk?
Astro solves these issues. It allows you to keep using “file-based routing” like you do with standard HTML files. But: it allows you to use Reach, Vue, Svelte, etc. in your page when needed, and even mixing them! By default it renders to static (super fast) HTML.
Recently,
Astro has received $7M in seed money to develop it further into a comprehensive and easy to use tool. It has the potential to move the web towards a simpler model again
Personally, I’m using Astro to build my new website which you’ll hear more about soon.
