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Making my site #nobuild
I've removed the frontend build steps from this site.
The main change is that my CSS is no longer built from LESS. The original reason to use a CSS pre-processor -- to gain access to features like nesting and variables -- are now native to the CSS spec, with pretty good support in modern browsers. So instead, I've converted all of my stylesheets to use modern, vanilla CSS.
It's nice to be able to put my Gulp-based build step and its associated NPM dependencies in the bin. Overkill for a site like this.
It feels like quite a leap. The era of pre-processors like LESS and SASS may be coming to an end, at least for sites like mine. It's similar to when we all realised we could now do almost anything that jQuery could do using modern JS. What a time to be alive.
I've also switched from inlining styles back to having versioned stylesheets with a long (3 month) cache expiry, which also helps to maintain this site's perfect 4x100 Lighthouse score.
