> I will keep using XSLT, and in fact will look for new opportunities to rely on it.
This is the closest I’ve seen, but it’s not an explanation of why it was important before the deprecation. It’s a declaration that they’re using it as an act of rebellion.
This is why so many people find this objectionable. If you want to have a basic blog, you need some HTML docments and and RSS/Atom feed. The technologies required to do this are HTML for the documents and XSLT to format the feed. Google is now removing one of those technologies, which makes it essentially impossible to serve a truly static website.
How so? You're just generating static pages. Generate ones that work.
It really feels like the developer has over-constrained the problem to work with browsers as they are right now in this context.
Would you also suggest I use separate URLs for HTTP/2 and HTTP/1.1? Maybe for a gzipped response vs a raw response?
It's the same content, just supplied in a different format. It should be the same URL.
Even cheaper than shipping the client an XML and an XSLT is just shipping them the HTML the XSLT would output in the first place.
A static site is a collection of static files. It doesn't need a server, you could just open it locally (in browsers that don't block file:// URI schemes). If you need some special configuration of the server, it is no longer a static site. The server is dynamically selecting which content is served.
But agreed; if your web server is just reflecting the filesystem, add this to the pile of "things that are hard with that kind of web server." But perhaps worth noting: even Apache and Python's http.server can select the file to emit based on the Accept header.
>you could definitely use a static site generator to create multiple versions of the site data and then configure your web server to select which data is emitted
And this web-server configuration would not exist within the static site. The static site generator could not output it, therefore it is not a part of the static site. It is not contained within the files output by the static site generator. It is additional dynamic content added by the web server.
It breaks the fundamental aspect of a static site, that it can be deployed simply to any service without change to the content. Just upload a zip file, and you are done.
I get your meaning; I've just heard "static site" used to refer to a site where the content isn't dynamically computed at runtime, not a site where the server is doing a near-direct-mapping from the filesystem to the HTTP output.
> Just upload a zip file, and you are done.
This is actually how I serve my static sites via Dreamhost. The zipfile includes the content negotiation rules in the `.htaccess` file.
(Perhaps worth remembering: even the rule "the HTTP responses are generated by looking up a file matching the path in the URL and echoing that file as the body of the GET response" is still a per-server rule; there's no aspect of the HTTP spec that declares "The filesystem is directly mirrored to web access" is a thing. It's rather a protocol used by many simple web servers, and most of them allow overrides to do something slightly more complicated while being one step away from "this is just the identity function on whatever is in your filesystem, well, not technically the identity function because unless someone did something very naughty, I don't serve anything for http://example.com/../uhoh-now-i-am-in-your-user-directory").