this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2026
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JavaScript
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Have you tried Astro? It's good for exactly this. You write Astro components that look a little bit like React components, but they're all rendered either during the build (when using static site generation) or server-side.
You get the developer experience of a modern JS framework, with the output of a static site with minimal JS.
Yes, I tried multiple popular SSR frameworks and use one at work. As a hobby, I've been making my own SSR framework that is much more minimal, based on Preact, Valibot, Vite, node:sqlite, URLPattern, gettext.js and a few companion libraries. (But components look more like old-school Mithril than React because no JSX extension, just standard JS.) I want its node_modules to stay below 200 MB and to pick such dependencies that the apps built with it can be included in Debian repositories and potentially FreedomBox. Hopefully I'll be ready to make a fedi post about it next month.