[mostlylurks]

> “Web development shouldn’t need a build step”

A build step is a huge barrier that makes authoring your own websites require significantly more expretise than it otherwise would. It thus makes web development less accessible, and puts anything even a little bit complicated out of reach of anyone who isn't already an experienced web developer or exceptionally dedicated. It also discourages the slow development of some pet website of a not-primarily-a-web-developer-by-trade into something more featureful, since expanding beyond the point where you can still reasonably avoid a build step suddenly requires acquiring a lot more exprertise and expending a lot of effort all in one go, instead of just being a smooth expansion into a more featureful project.

The simpler it is to make your own website without having extensive web development experience, the more people will be able to have their own website instead of being directed to the endless array of corporate silos like social media (which has largely replaced personal websites) and corporate middlemen (which have largely replaced in-house commercial websites for smaller actors) that take care of the burden of making your own website for you, with some rather obvious downsides.

[Yaina]

I mean, a build step is not required to build a website, but I'd say anyone who wants to have more than one HTML page and one stylesheet will probably want some sort of build step sooner rather than later.

Like, if you have two or more pages, you probably want them to share the same header or footer, and unless you want to A) repeat the same markup on each page or B) inject them with a client-side script, you will need some sort of build step. There are more accessible solutions out there, like Hugo.

How else are you going to achieve that? Sure you could use PHP, but I don't see how that is more accessible or maintainable than having a build step.

[dakna]

> How else are you going to achieve that?

People already thought about that problem when the World Wide Web was invented and they came up with Server Side Includes [0], a scripting standard that predates the Apache HTTP Server.

Looks like this inside the HTML document:

<!--#include file="header.html" -->

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

Not many people use this anymore, but it is easy to share common markup and very accessible for people with just basic HTML knowledge. Major web servers of today still support it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes.