Thoughts about "lighter weight clerk"

[borkdude]

Lighter weight vs heavy could mean various things:

Static output

Problem statements:

• Rendered clerk artifact takes too long to load. This makes the static output less suited for:
  • Static blog engines (people want their blogs to load fast)
  • Mobile / bad internet / developing countries

Possible solutions:

• Better caching of JS assets
• Reduce bundle size by leaving out certain things (e.g. SCI if you only need non-custom viewers)
• Modularize things (e.g. a katex module which you can leave out when you're not using katex)
• Reduce bundle size via SSR and either not use any JS client side (or load JS to "hydrate" the SSR-ed content)
• Use cherry to pre-compile JS on server, use only the compiled output in notebook, not compiler itself

Inspirations:

• Astro
• HTMX
• clj-kondo driven .clj highlighting

Environment

Problem statements:

• We want to use clerk for lighter weight environments like bb so we can ...

Possible solutions:

• Make clerk bb compatible, see Clerk in Babashka #232

Feel free to respond if any of this sounds useful to you and we can elaborate on this, whether there are problems that users experience or not and to which degree.