swup VS Slim

https://swup.js.org/ single-page-app but with minimal framework, still along for the feel of an SPA

Sure, you can use any number of JS-avoidance libraries. I'm a fan of Turbo, and there's also htmx, Unpoly, Alpine, hyperscript, swup, barba.js, and probably others.

Swup is this nice page transition library I found recently : https://swup.js.org/

2. The newly released fragment-plugin [3] that provides a declarative API for dynamically replacing containers based on rules

I can now finally build websites that tick all three boxes:

1. Visually impressive, fun, and snappy by using swup's first-class support for animations[4], cache[5], and preload capacities[6], enhanced with fragment visits as seen on the demo site.

2. Accessible by being able to serve server-rendered semantic markup that will fully work even with JavaScript disabled (try it out on the demo site!). On top of that, swup's a11y plugin[7] will automatically announce page visits to assistive technologies and will focus the new `

` element after each visit.

3. Because now all I need for my fancy frontend is a bit of progressive JavaScript, I can choose whatever tool I like on the server, keeping complexity low and maintainability high. I can use SSGs like eleventy or Astro (the demo site is built using Astro!), I can use any CMS like WordPress or ProcessWire, or a framework like Laravel. And I don't have to maintain an additional node server for SSG!

And all it took was 20 years! ;)

[0] https://github.com/swup/swup

So what are View Transitions good for? In short, they allow adding animated page transitions. Although we already have several standard options to animate stuff on web pages (CSS Transitions, CSS Animations or the Web Animations API) and countless more options in particular JavaScript frameworks and libraries (Framer Motion for React, Vue Transitions, Svelte Transitions, Swup, Barba.js or Animate.css to name just a few), the web still lacks a generic, standards-based and easy-to-use solution to animate transitions between pages or during DOM updates. At least that’s what Google engineers say and I tend to agree with them.

Is https://turbo.hotwired.dev/ my replacement? Or Swup.js?

I've used https://swup.js.org/. Simple to setup with one of the built in/contributed themes, haven't tried building a custom theme however. Also has a lot of good plugins for eg. accessibility. I used it in combination with Astro so a static site with a separate html file for each page.

Like Gatsby or Next, Astro does not have any client side navigation. So each link click triggers a full page reload. Astro recommends to use Swup as mentioned here. Turbo is also another option though the team does not recommend it. I'm currently using Swup which I'll probably switch from or completely remove it as I have added TOC to MDX and clicking on a title is not redirecting the page to that particular section.

I spent a few days of my spare time building a VS Code extension that would bring better syntax highlighting for the Slim template language to the editor. I quite enjoyed most of the process so I’d like to share what I learned.

I think they mean Server Side Rendering (normal rails controllers/views), and Slim is just the name of the templating engine. It's a little nicer than the default ERB. https://github.com/slim-template/slim

There's also SSR with react and other js frameworks, but I don't think that's what they meant.

I use something very similar on https://lunar.fyi and https://lowtechguys.com but I wouldn’t call this “simple” anymore.

They use Jinja templating, I prefer Slim (https://github.com/slim-template/slim#syntax-example) which has a more Pythonic syntax (there is plim [0] in Python for that)

I use Tailwind as well for terse styling and fast experimentation (allows me to write a darkMode-aware and responsive 100 line CSS in a single line with about 10 classes)

For interaction I can write CoffeeScript directly in the page [1] and have it compiled by plim.

I run a Caddy static server [2] and use Syncthing [3] to have every file save deployed instantly to my Hetzner server.

I use entr [4] and livereloadx [5] to rebuild the pages and do hot reload on file save. All the commands are managed in a simple Makefile [6]

———

You can already see how the footnotes take up a large chunk of this comment, this is not my idea of simple. Sure, the end result is readable static HTML and I never have to fight obscure React errors, but it’s a high effort setup for starters.

Simple for me would be: write markdown files for pages, a simple CSS for general styling (should be optional), click to deploy on my domain. Images should automatically be resized to multiple sizes and optimized, videos re-encoded for smaller filesize etc.

I have mostly implemented that for myself (https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/How%20I%20write%20this%20blog...) but it feels fragile. I’d rather pay for a professional solution.

[0] https://plim.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[1] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/src/rcmd...

[2] https://caddyserver.com/docs/command-line#caddy-file-server

[3] https://syncthing.net

[4] https://github.com/eradman/entr

[5] https://nitoyon.github.io/livereloadx/

[6] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/Makefile

Checkout slim https://github.com/slim-template/slim it's a templating language

And this is what the HTML looks like (I'm using slim):

The template renders the tag and inside it the link and the counter itself (the Slim template language and Tailwind styling are used here, hopefully the notation is sufficiently self-explaining):

In this part of the series, let's explore another popular templating language, Slim.

Templating languages are widely used in Web development and two of the most popular ones are Pug and Slim. In this series, we're going to learn the basics of these two and hopefully they would help improve your workflow further.

You may want to checkout slim I'v tried ERB, SLIM, and HAML and absolutely sware by slim it's very easy to use and saves a ton of typing compared to ERB.