eleventy 🕚⚡️ VS Tailwind CSS

This post outlines the steps for migrating an existing BlogCFC blog to a JamStack, with a focus on using Eleventy.

I suggest you to try out eleventhy (https://www.11ty.dev/)

Quite simple to start, and a nice system to add some scripting and styles without the requirement of bringing in a framework.

A production flag enables you to run activities in dev or production such as minifying assets, showing draft posts, etc. There isn't a built-in flag or function that comes with eleventy (11ty) specifically for this. However we have this info at our fingertips.

I can't recommend Eleventy enough!

https://www.11ty.dev

I converted my WordPress blog to Eleventy 4 years ago and never looked back, it's been delightful!

https://www.joshcanhelp.com/taking-wordpress-to-eleventy/

It’s 2024, and you are about to start a new project. Do you reach for React, a framework you know and love or do you look at one of the other hot new frameworks like Astro, Enhance, 11ty, SvelteKit or gasp, plain vanilla Web Components?

The "dev" script is running the eleventy server in dev mode. The details of the script are not important for this discussion, but to round out the background here is an abbreviated version of my package.json:

Eleventy is a fast and powerful SSG that really shines when it comes to pure static site generation because it does not require the loading of a client-side JavaScript bundle in order to serve content.

The irony is using a JavaScript-based static site generator to make the site: https://www.11ty.dev

https://doublejosh.com/post/186193119278/metalsmithjs-is-sti...

Then two years ago I needed a more robust SSR system based on React, so I went with GatsbyJS. It's insanely mature and intuitive, but as we all know that community and business is now drying up too. But the framework is still great.

Now everyone sings the praises of NextJS, which can be used for SSR but is intended for applications and active server endpoints. But more complexity doesn't mean better.

I'm keen to try other simple frameworks when the result is a static site. I may give https://www.11ty.dev a shot.

11ty is a lightweight static site generator. I chopped up my HTML and used the 11ty starter template called eleventy-base-blog as the structural foundation for the site.

Finally, for our front end, we’re going to be pairing Next.js with the great combination of TailwindCSS and shadcn/ui so we can focus on building the functionality of the app and let them handle making it look awesome!

You can use any frontend framework you want — react-based tooling, however, has a natural advantage as it models everything as a function of state, which can map 1:1 with the concept in Burr. In the demo app we use react, react-query, and tailwind, but we’ll be skipping over this largely (it is not central to the purpose of the post).

Tailwind CSS: A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom designs.

First, you need to make sure that you have a working Tailwind CSS project…

Tailwind CSS

With better CSS approaches like TailwindCSS and Vanilla Extract (which we're heavily using) it's much easier to maintain the UI and make sure it doesn't change unexpectedly. No more conflicting CSS classes, much less CSS specificity issues and much less CSS code in general.

This app was built with Svelte Kit, Tailwind CSS, and many other technologies. For a full rundown, please visit the GitHub repository

Unlike Tailwind, which has over 77,000 stars on GitHub, Mojo CSS has about 200 stars on GitHub. But the Mojo CSS documentation is fairly good and you can find most of the information you’ll need there.

JavaScript React Flowbite Tailwind Firebase - Auth, Database, and Hosting Vite

- Performance is a feature.

Another common interpretation of brutalism is aesthetic, reacting to overly complicated user interfaces by creating simpler, more direct ones. Tailwind CSS (https://tailwindcss.com), one of today's most popular CSS libraries, promotes this approach in its component examples. There's also a neat library I've seen recently called "Neobrutalism Components" for React that I like (https://neobrutalism-components.vercel.app), providing components with a similar look and feel to Gumroad. This might more accurately be called 'Neo-Brutalism,' as noted in the comments.

A more engineering-centric interpretation of Brutalism focuses on form, structure, and efficiency, drawing significantly from brutalist architecture principles. Apart from the user interface itself, most mobile, desktop, and web applications are extremely bloated and often perform worse than sites from 10 years ago did. While one HTML file might be "less brutalist" than the original HN site, it is substantially more brutalist than any HN mobile app in existence, and offers nearly identical functionality.

A broader interpretation of brutalism, which could be termed 'Meta-Brutalism,' is embodied in the overall experience on this site through UX flows. Yes, in the strictest sense, the original HN site is more Brutalist in many ways, but it only shows 30 articles at a time and does not function as a PWA. For this site, the experience of reading 10 stories is arguably less brutalist, but for quickly browsing through several pages and skimming articles (which is how I read HN) it is a lot faster, and in my opinion, more Brutalist.

My primary inspiration was addressing software and tool bloat in UIs rather than strictly adhering to every principle set forth by David Bryant Copeland. I don't find it convincing that this site "isn't brutalist" compared to really any other experience apart from the Main HN site, and I would argue the overall experience is more brutalist in its performance and scrolling behavior.

As a side note: I generally don't like Brutalist architecture that much although I believe it is unfairly maligned. I visited the Salk Institute once and enjoyed it though (https://www.archdaily.com/61288/ad-classics-salk-institute-l...).