I seem to be alternating between working with html and Lua L Future of Coding #devlog-together

I seem to be alternating between working with html...

Kartik Agaram

02/13/2025, 5:07 PM

I seem to be alternating between working with html and Lua/LÖVE. In the last few days I've been trying to extract some more timeless tools out of the ad hoc static site I replaced my old Rails website with a couple of years ago. Here's the project. Requires just Lua (any version after 5.1) and nothing else. In particular, it doesn't mess with any Markdown variant, just leaves you to edit raw HTML. There's 3 tools that you can use independently that read a common data source of files with some

---

metadata up top and a small number of

VARIABLES

that get substituted in. Each tool is self-contained in a single

.lua

file and so easy to mix and match. For example, my site has two distinct blogs (main site and devlog). I run the first tool once and the others twice each. I can't quite cut my site over to this, though. Open questions I ran into with my site: • How to style the pagination links. Those bits of html are hard-coded in the generator. • Some of my older blog posts have no titles. Then I want to show the date in the

<title>

tag, but show no title in the

<body>

(because I already show the date and it would be redundant). It's unclear how to do that without a whole templating language. I'm sure there are others. SSGs seem to be one of those things that everyone a unique-snowflake version of. But check it out if you're willing to leave Markdown behind. Using HTML is more accessible than Markdown. For example, it lets you distinguish a couple of key categories of `<code>`: keyboard shortcuts with

<kbd>

, references to names in other snippets with

<var>

and computer output with

<samp>

. Markdown's backticks can't do that. It doesn't matter if you never share your posts, and it's natural to not want to look at HTML given how monstrous it can get. But HTML also has a lovely core that a lot of civilizational effort went into, and it's sad that layers above don't use all of it. A little more manual labor can provide a nicer reading experience for others.

Konrad Hinsen

02/14/2025, 9:23 AM

This reminds me of a question I have been pondering for a while: why am I content with editing LaTeX but not HTML? Both have similar ratios of markup to text. I suspect that one reason is better editor support. Emacs plus AucTeX is great. I haven't seen anything comparable for HTML. But I doubt this is the whole story.

Kartik Agaram

02/14/2025, 1:16 PM

Thought after reading that: We change our tools and then our tools change us. I suspect my writing experience is stuck in the stone ages compared to you. But not being dependent on certain tools lets me get to some tight places that you perhaps can't get into.

Konrad Hinsen

02/27/2025, 9:14 AM

Update: web-mode for Emacs is very nice for HTML editing. It has tons of functionality I most likely will never use, but it might make me adopt HTML as a document format after some fine-tuning.

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