I’m not deep enough in the elm community to comment on the usage of elm-ui in any known pages.
I know for a fact that elm-ui generated some waves, and Richard Feldman mentioned it in this talk as a potential “killer app” for elm, like rails was for ruby:
What I can say to the comparison with Jekyll is limited to my experience with Hugo. I’ve used Jekyll only briefly but from what I can tell it’s quite similar to Hugo, from a philosophy standpoint. As such I’ll assume that a comparison between elm-pages and Jekyll is fundamentally similar to a comparison between elm and Hugo.
Given this is true, I can say that the fundamental approach of elm-pages and Hugo/Jekyll differs in how they actually generate the final result: HTML pages.
Jekyll and Hugo are both based on templates. As such you more or less write HTML and sprinkle some template magic on top (speak partials, loops, etc.), with all the pitfalls this brings to the table (typos, duplication, etc.).
With elm-pages the generation is based on code, you don’t deal with templates when using elm-pages. This shouldn’t be surprising if you’ve ever had contact with elm before: when building a page with elm, you stay in “elm-land”.
This has a number of advantages and of course also disadvantages. Advantages include:
- static typing: elm has a great type system and extremly helpful compiler errors (seriously, they’re amazing)
- composability & flexibility: as you’re writing code you’re free to split and reuse it as you see fit
- context switching: no need to switch between HTML and code (and even CSS if you want)
- static HTTP requests: this is a neat feature of elm-pages, basically you can send an HTTP request at build time and then transform the response to content for your page (I’m not aware of any Jekyll/Hugo equivalent)
But as said before, there are of course disadvantages:
- themes: AFAIK elm-pages doesn’t have a “theme” functionality as Jekyll or Hugo do
- plugins: as elm-pages is by far not as popular as Jekyll or Hugo, so of course this is falling behind, on the other hand as everything is “just elm” you’re free to use all the elm libraries out there
I think all of this boils down to this:
elm-pages gives you the tools to build a statically generated website but requires a DIY attitude, Jekyll and Hugo offer an opinionated approach to static website building but require buy-in into their way of doing things.
At the end of the day it’s a question of how much flexibility you want to trade for productivity. And for me this question is currently clearly answered with “please give me more flexbility”.
Does this paint a clearer picture, @AstonJ?