What are static site generators and why are they important?
SSGs have been around since early in the history of web development with systems such as HSC (which stands for HTML Sucks Completely) and Movable Type looking to solve the sometimes problematic developer experience of authoring plain HTML for multi-page sites. These technologies added features such as includes and macros that made creating and maintaining HTML websites much easier.
The other direction development began to move in was rendering templates on the server instead of serving simple HTML back per request. The upside to this was a strong developer experience and the ability to create pages dynamically. Templates were created and uploaded to a server and when a request came from a client, the pages’ HTML was built and sent to the client. This methodology would become the predominant authoring experience for the web over the next decade. With it came longer load times.
SSGs would see a boost in 2008 with...
