No build step. That’s the advantage.

There is though. Every time someone visits a page.

There are no server side components.

This appears to be a static site generator in that regard. Just that it outputs a single-paged app as opposed to a linked directory.

Static site generator is a very well defined thing. Content, static pages out.

This isn't 'generating static pages'. It's rendering a page every time you access it, you've just moved the rendering to the browser's JS runtime.

I don't get what the fear around building is. Many static site generators don't even require you to install additional toolchains[0], so churning out static HTML content from markdown should be just as easy.

It's better to spend just a couple minutes setting up a static site generator into your workflow than to have every user who pulls up your STATIC website perform template rendering and all that garbage. I know computers are fast and it doesn't seem like it really makes that much of a difference, but thinking like this often leads to inefficiencies in other applications as well.

[0]: https://github.com/keats/gutenberg

I mean it's hard to compete with installation instructions as simple as "commit this file in the root of your docs/ directory" and point GH pages at it.

All though I agree with the JS comment. It's still an interesting idea to generate a document hub from markdown. This makes a lot of sense. I do agree again that the JS is a bit overboard but I'm not that turned away by it.

What regular SSG wouldn't let you do the same? A SSG is ridiculously simple to hookup to a CI/CD chain to publish changes once pushed to the repo.

If I knew what the acronyms meant, maybe I could tell you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSG

??? I know what markdown is.

Static site generator?

[0] https://github.com/myles/awesome-static-generators

I built a documentation-orientated static site generating CMS that acts as a git repository.

I lost a bit of momentum with the project as I had paid work to do, but in the meantime the landscape has filled up with competition.

https://www.graphia.co.uk

I agree entirely, here is a great example of documentation created with static CMS https://marketplace.getpublii.com/products/documentation/