Does the Next Generation of Static Site Generators Make Building Sites Better?

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Just ran across îles, a new static site generator mostly centered around Vue. The world has no particular shortage of static site generators, but it’s interesting to see what this “next generation” of SSGs seem to focus on or try to solve.

îles looks to take a heaping spoonful of inspiration from Astro. If we consider them together, along with other emerging and quickly-evolving SSGs, there is some similarities:

• Ship zero JavaScript by default. Interactive bits are opt-in — that’s what the islands metaphor is all about. Astro and îles do it at the per-component level and SvelteKit prefers it at the page level.
• Additional fanciness around controls for when hydration happens, like “when the browser is idle,” or “when the component is visible.”
• Use a fast build tool, like Vite which is Go-based esbuild under the hood. Or Rust-based swc in the case of Next 12.
• Support multiple JavaScript frameworks for componentry. Astro and îles do this out of the box, and another example is how Slinkity brings that to Eleventy.
• File-system based routing.
• Assumption that Markdown is used for content.

When you compare these to first-cohort SSGs, like Jekyll, I get a few feelings:

1. These really aren’t that much different. The feature set is largely the same.
2. The biggest change is probably that far more of them are JavaScript library based. Turns out JavaScript libraries are what really what people wanted out of HTML preprocessors, perhaps because of the strong focus on components.
3. They are incrementally better. They are faster, the live reloading is better, the common needs have been ironed out.

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