Static Site Generators

Chapter 1. What Are Static Sites?

A Little Background

There’s been a lot of talk recently about static sites and the new generation of tools used to create them, commonly referred to as “static site generators” or “static site engines.” As with any new technology, it can sometimes be hard to differentiate the hype from the reality. This book aims to give you a broad understanding of the technology: what it is and where it best applies. First, however, we need to define what static sites are and where they came from.

The term “static site” is an interesting one if you think about it, as it defines itself by what it lacks. The “static” aspect doesn’t so much describe a feature as the absence of one: dynamic page rendering. Once upon a time, probably before we commonly used the term “static site,” this would have been considered a weakness.

Those of us who’ve been working in web development for some time probably recall building static sites using tools like Dreamweaver, HomeSite, or (heaven forbid) FrontPage. The content on these pages could only be changed by manually altering the existing site files and replacing the files on the server via FTP.

There were a number of issues with this process. Adding content to the site required a moderately high level of technical knowledge, either knowledge of the specific tool used to design and build the site or of HTML to hand code the site. One also needed to understand how to deploy the site to a host via FTP, which isn’t necessarily straightforward ...