Web Origami, for making websites where you can understand how they’re made

[chefandy]

My interest in this is piqued. I’m really happy to see people doing things to simplify personal standalone website authorship making it expressive and flexible without a bulky content management system or jumping through hoops for some front-end toolchain. I know when I’m developing things I’m often as or more concerned with satisfying multiple use cases or functionality extensibility, but having a nice focused tool polished for one use case is nice. When I was deep in web dev and had my machine set up with a selection of go-to docker setups for different dev needs and the knowledge of how that all needed to be orchestrated was fresh in my mind, deploying most of the SSGs or whatever seemed trivial. Now in the odd event that I have a personal project or whatever that indicates more than just a few static handmade pages, the first thing I do after looking up what todays web world consider to be the “obvious” best tools and practices is see how many people are asking about counterintuitive config issues or other getting-started type problems. As cool as whatever application might look, I know I’ve got about two good hours in me of recall, research and troubleshooting before I just say “fuck it. Guess I didn’t want to do that project anyway.” The point of those tools is to save time and energy — you don’t have to get very far outside “the loop” for it to take more effort than it’s worth to get back in for a lot of them. Simple tools for simple tasks are great when you know you’ll never ever need built-in hooks to wrangle graphql queries and automatically invalidate CDN caches and generate 10 sizes of images optimized for every conceivable device or whatever.

[zwnow]

Whats wrong with just using HTML, Js and CSS for personal projects?

[deanebarker]

So... it's a static site generator? I've looked through the site, but I'm having trouble putting it in context. Sounds like it takes data and turns it into a static website. Is that right?

[JeremyBarbosa]

That's how I read it too? And while the documentation has lots of examples, I get a bit lost in that you start with some form of JSON file, which consumes either YAML or HTML files, who in turn can consume Markdown files. It doesn't seem (from my reading!) to have the level of abstraction I would expect from a SSG.

[bryanrasmussen]

so, you're saying the claim of making websites where you can understand how they're made doesn't seem to hold up?

[turnsout]

Interesting, and I love Static Site Generators (SSGs), but as soon as you introduce branching and logic to the page creation, you've effectively ruled out non-programmers. So I don't know how it will achieve the stated goal of "a language for making websites where you can understand how they're made."

The audience you're left with (programmers) will bristle at the DSL and wonder why they don't just use "___" <-- fill in their favorite SSG.

[xrd]

I love this.

And, I have my own take on it.

My static site generator Svekyll (https://extrastatic.dev/svekyll/svekyll-cli) has an option you can add to the _config.yml: "view_source"

If you do that, it provides a link at the bottom of each post which says "view source to this post" If you click on that, you can see all the files used to generate that post, and then download a zip which is a fully packaged tiny svelte app that builds into that blog page.

For example, this blog post on embeddings has a bunch of svelte components, embeds an embedding model right inside the page and runs it via JavaScript. If you scroll all the way down, you can download the zip file, unzip it and run "npm i && npm run build && cd build && npx http-server -o" and you can see the fully built blog.

https://webiphany.com/2024-04-29-distance-sean-shawn

PRs describing this feature:

https://extrastatic.dev/svekyll/svekyll-cli/-/merge_requests... https://extrastatic.dev/svekyll/svekyll-cli/-/merge_requests... https://extrastatic.dev/svekyll/svekyll-cli/-/merge_requests...

[ayoreis]

Also: https://jan.miksovsky.com/posts/2024/11-20-programming-langu...

[bqmjjx0kac]

This site would benefit from a comparison with other static site generators.

I dare say it's not that difficult for a programmer to roll their own SSG with whatever is at hand.

Does it have any clever properties that naive solution wouldn't?

* Like reproducible builds or incremental/cacheable builds?

* Does it require the entire site fits in memory at build time, or can it generate terabyte-sized sites without breaking a sweat?

[OuterVale]

I'm using Origami on my website over at https://vale.rocks. I recently did a brief writeup about the implementation of my site, including touchings on Origami. I'm really loving it!

https://vale.rocks/posts/the-implementation-of-this-site

[johnisgood]

When I scroll down, the "VALE" stuff goes above the menu, making both unreadable. Might want to fix that.

[nullbyte]

This looks great! I love the simplicity of the syntax. I feel like other static site generators can get too crazy with syntax and features, making it hard to learn. I think Origami is really nice in comparison. Also great looking docs.

[weego]

The metaphor is strained at best, and confusing at worst. It's a very high-concept pitch and so is the technical documentation, but the use case is aimed at people doing something, ultimately, very simple. I'm not sure that friction works at all.

[j45]

Unnecessary complexity can decrease the shelf life and lifetime of a piece of software.

Best to keep it simple to let any complex needs arrive on their own, instead of prematurely complicating things.

[wackget]

> The Origami language syntax is relatively simple and intended for people who have some experience working with HTML and CSS. Knowledge of JavaScript isn’t required, although if you do know JavaScript you can do a lot with Origami.

So you need to learn HTML and CSS so you can use Origami to... avoid building a site with HTML and CSS?

[OuterVale]

It isn't at all about not building with HTML/CSS. It's a language that makes building with HTML/CSS and other web standards easier.

[msdundarss]

Thanks for making it open-source!

[schindlabua]

Don't hate it but it feels like the Origami language should just be a typescript library. I'm not a fan of DSLs in general though.

[hombre_fatal]

Yeah, I don't see how using a DSL helps get any closer to "understanding how the website is made" especially once you look at its templating system.

I think a better description of the project is that it's built around its async-tree abstraction: https://weborigami.org/pattern/

[ramon156]

Cool idea! Don't think I'm the target audience though. Maybe this is something for people who are starting out with web dev?

[hiked]

This doesn't look too bad, I'm very interested in it, it's helped me a lot

[magnio]

I'm not sure if we need another bundler, but this one surely has the best name.

[jcalabro]

The logo is quite similar to Roc?

[0] https://www.roc-lang.org/

[klntsky]

What's the motivation for making it another language as opposed to a framework / library?

[taco_emoji]

YAML? C'mon, guys

[inanutshellus]

From your description I expected a pile of legalese, but in reading it... I don't see "passive-aggressive" I see simple etiquette guidelines that shouldn't have to be said, but... clearly do.

Often users screaming "I won't use [your project] if you don't fix [my whim]!"** actually does get some traction. So saying explicitly in the readme that that is rude and won't be allowed seems ... healthy.

Notably, because it's just one dude's passion project, not a corporate-backed such-n-such, we don't want him resenting ever creating it, right?

  **  (or, to wit, "if you don't change your README I wouldn't want to use this." lol)

[mplewis]

Great – that is exactly how the author wants to be treated. They have set some clear boundaries about working with random internet people like us, and it’s our responsibility to respect those boundaries.

[soco]

And still supporting HTTP. I don't know about this, anyone can suggest a reason to use HTTP nowadays?

[optymizer]

  * To serve content that can be accessed on networks using captive portals
  * To serve content on localhost while developing
  * To serve content on devices where setting up letsencrypt or other SSL is either too much of a hassle or not important
  * To stand up a quick HTTP server on hacked servers

Maybe others can come up with more examples

[hn_throwaway_99]

Why do you say "still supporting HTTP"? AFAICT this is just a site builder, but doesn't enforce how the site is deployed.

It includes "builtins" for accessing other resources (i.e., as a client) using HTTP, but I hope it should be obvious why that is a necessity.

[TheRealPomax]

Sure: your web server doesn't need to care about the "S" part in the slightest in order for the web site to work over HTTPS.

Reverse proxies have existed for a very, very long time, you simply run a local HTTP server and you let the reverse proxy take care of https-to-and-from-the-WAN-side part. Even in dev context, that takes at most a few minutes to set up these days thanks to letsencrypt's certbot.

[gspencley]

Others have offered good reasons but I'm going to offer another one, and I mean this seriously:

- Because I want to

Not everything is security sensitive. Some information is entirely public and has no need for encryption. While SSL is also provides protection against man in the middle attacks, which helps you to trust that the information you are reading has not been compromised and altered, this is also a security requirement that just doesn't exist in a lot of use cases.

So yeah, private internal networks where information security just isn't a requirement because the information is not at all sensitive and nothing bad will happen in a worst case scenario ... don't force things on people that don't require those things.

I can sort of understand the rationale for web browsers pushing encryption for public websites, with the amount of ecommerce that happens in current year. But if your use case doesn't fall into that bucket, and if you've done your own risk analysis and came to the conclusion that you don't need encryption for what you're doing because nothing bad can possibly happen then there's no need to jump through the hassle of setting up certificates.