Notes on choosing Astro

2025-05-21

I rebuilt this site in Astro and the deciding factor was simple: it ships no JavaScript by default.

A blog is text. It should arrive as HTML, render instantly, and work in a text browser. Astro lets me write components when I want them, but the output for a plain post is just markup and a small stylesheet.

A few things I appreciated:

• Content collections give posts a typed schema, so a missing date fails the build instead of the page.
• Markdown gets syntax highlighting at build time via Shiki — no client-side highlighter.
• The mental model is “HTML-first, opt into JS”, which matches how I think about content.

Here’s the entire client-side cost of this page:

0 KB of JavaScript.

That’s the point.