Simon Willison’s Weblog

Building Websites With Lots of Little HTML Pages (via) Jim Nielsen coins a confusing new acronym - LLMS for (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(S). He's using this to describe his latest site refresh which makes extensive use of cross-document view transitions - a fabulous new progressive enhancement CSS technique that's supported in Chrome and Safari (and hopefully soon in Firefox).

With cross-document view transitions getting broader and broader support, I’m realizing that building in-page, progressively-enhanced interactions is more work than simply building two HTML pages and linking them.

Jim now has small static pages powering his home page filtering interface and even his navigation menu, with CSS view transitions configured to smoothly animate between the pages. I think it feels really good - here's what it looked like for me in Chrome (it looked the same both with and without JavaScript disabled):

Watching the network panel in my browser, most of these pages are 17-20KB gzipped (~45KB after they've decompressed). No wonder it feels so snappy.

I poked around in Jim's CSS and found this relevant code:

@view-transition {
  navigation: auto;
}

.posts-nav a[aria-current="page"]:not(:last-child):after {
  border-color: var(--c-text);
  view-transition-name: posts-nav;
}

/* Old stuff going out */
::view-transition-old(posts-nav) {
  animation: fade 0.2s linear forwards;
  /* https://jakearchibald.com/2024/view-transitions-handling-aspect-ratio-changes/ */
  height: 100%;
}

/* New stuff coming in */
::view-transition-new(posts-nav) {
  animation: fade 0.3s linear reverse;
  height: 100%;
}

@keyframes fade {
  from {
    opacity: 1;
  }
  to {
    opacity: 0;
  }
}

Jim observes:

This really feels like a game-changer for simple sites. If you can keep your site simple, it’s easier to build traditional, JavaScript-powered on-page interactions as small, linked HTML pages.

I've experimented with view transitions for Datasette in the past and the results were very promising. Maybe I'll pick that up again.

Bonus: Jim has a clever JavaScript trick to avoid clicks to the navigation menu being added to the browser's history in the default case.