<story><title>Static site hosting hurdles</title><url>https://notes.volution.ro/v1/2022/09/notes/b08118d8/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Dalewyn</author><text>&amp;gt;We’ve already standardized the hosting side of static sites by using the file system.&lt;p&gt;Worth noting that the incoming younger generations can&amp;#x27;t and don&amp;#x27;t into file systems.[1]&lt;p&gt;Yes, anyone who wants to be a webmaster should do their homework, but that is besides the point.&lt;p&gt;We are probably the last generation who can be ubiquitously assumed to have an understanding of files and folders&amp;#x2F;directories in a computer.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theverge.com&amp;#x2F;22684730&amp;#x2F;students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theverge.com&amp;#x2F;22684730&amp;#x2F;students-file-folder-direc...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>akerl_</author><text>It felt odd to see a doc this comprehensive on static site hosting with no mention of AWS S3&amp;#x2F;Cloudfront, given how easy it is to push content to an S3 bucket (either manually or via the CI pipeline of your choosing) and then serve it up either direct-from-S3 or via Cloudfront.&lt;p&gt;But then it turns out that this is actually pushing folks towards some new paradigm of static cached HTTP responses instead of files. It pitches this as an attempt to “standardize the hosting side of static sites”, which doesn’t pass muster for me. We’ve already standardized the hosting side of static sites by using the file system. Shifting to a new storage format besides “HTML on disk” doesn’t unify anything, nor does it seem desirable to have fewer options for serving content.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hedora</author><text>In fairness to younger generations, I can never figure out how to use file choosers in modern operating systems or in crap like google drive.&lt;p&gt;It takes me a minimum of 60 seconds to naviate to ~ using the GUI on my work laptop.&lt;p&gt;(Partially because the dialog box sucks, and partially because I only do that once every 6 months or so.)&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s like some UI designer didn&amp;#x27;t understand folders, then somehow forced their brain damaged mental model of them on the rest of the population.  After that, for some reason I will never understand, the rest of the industry copied the design.&lt;p&gt;(I&amp;#x27;ve worked on filesystem implementations, tested for POSIX compliance, debugged insane customer issues, etc, etc.  I know how directories work...)</text></comment>
<story><title>Static site hosting hurdles</title><url>https://notes.volution.ro/v1/2022/09/notes/b08118d8/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Dalewyn</author><text>&amp;gt;We’ve already standardized the hosting side of static sites by using the file system.&lt;p&gt;Worth noting that the incoming younger generations can&amp;#x27;t and don&amp;#x27;t into file systems.[1]&lt;p&gt;Yes, anyone who wants to be a webmaster should do their homework, but that is besides the point.&lt;p&gt;We are probably the last generation who can be ubiquitously assumed to have an understanding of files and folders&amp;#x2F;directories in a computer.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theverge.com&amp;#x2F;22684730&amp;#x2F;students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theverge.com&amp;#x2F;22684730&amp;#x2F;students-file-folder-direc...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>akerl_</author><text>It felt odd to see a doc this comprehensive on static site hosting with no mention of AWS S3&amp;#x2F;Cloudfront, given how easy it is to push content to an S3 bucket (either manually or via the CI pipeline of your choosing) and then serve it up either direct-from-S3 or via Cloudfront.&lt;p&gt;But then it turns out that this is actually pushing folks towards some new paradigm of static cached HTTP responses instead of files. It pitches this as an attempt to “standardize the hosting side of static sites”, which doesn’t pass muster for me. We’ve already standardized the hosting side of static sites by using the file system. Shifting to a new storage format besides “HTML on disk” doesn’t unify anything, nor does it seem desirable to have fewer options for serving content.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Spivak</author><text>I’m apparently young enough to be targeted by this article so I’ll weigh in. We’re better off for it, files as a storage layer and&amp;#x2F;or format (meaning how routes on web servers are defined by the folder structure) suuucks. File semantics are annoying, complicated enough that nobody really gets them right, and broken at the margins. The concept of a virtual read head and seeking around files would never be invented today. File descriptors keeping random external magic state? What could go wrong? All but a tiny few file operations not being atomic — bleugh. See the stuff Ansible has to do just to get atomic copy.   Permissions, attrs, xattrs, acls, and SELinux tags are a god damn mess. Locking is also a mess and filesystem dependent — sqlite doesn’t officially support NFS because of it. And with all that useless metadata we still don’t have a way of actually reliably specifying the format or encoding of files leading to garbage library after garbage library for guessing it. File paths being binary strings on Linux is a ridiculous tripwire, running out of inodes or open file handles is a leaky abstraction, links — hard and soft are a bandaid and make traversal stupid to reason about. Look at the dumb shit tar has to do to deal with it. Holding handles to deleted files is absolutely ass backwards and a pox on the people that made it necessary for updates to work. File rotation just  shouldn’t be necessary. The application having to think about compression is the wrong layer. Whoever invented unix:abstract files committed a warcrime.&lt;p&gt;If you’re someone who likes working with the filesystem directly, why? Seriously why? It really does seem like anything would be better.&lt;p&gt;Even for code, wouldn’t you rather things like Python modules or packages be first class objects? No more sys.path nonsense, no more namespacing, just your whole venv in a single trivially relocatable file.</text></comment>