Svelte & Content - What's Svelte’s creator take on your website's CMS? ft Rich Harris

Hey, so I'm Sam from Prismic. I'm here with Richard from Svelte. Thanks for being here, Rich. Thank you. And so now we're talking about one of my favorite subjects, which is content. I mean, every developer deals with this, you're building some sort of an application, and then you might even just have like the text for a button, you might have a whole blog, you might have a, you know, whatever, a glossary, you need to figure out where to put that content. And that's a hard question. Now, in the web development world today, Nuxt, Astro, 11t, they've all come up with

specific features for how you should handle content. Svelte, so far, as far as I know, doesn't have that. How does Svelte think about content? It kind of is left as a problem for the application developer to solve to a large extent. And the reason it's possible for us to do that is because things like Prismic exist. And we can sort of say, you know, here are the primitives and people can build integration layers between them. And so, you know, if you are building an

application that has content that is stored in Prismic, then you can, like there's a page in your documentation that you can follow, and it just works. That's not to say that that's necessarily the ideal scenario. Like Svelte's whole thing is that things should be built in. If you're going to need them, then there should be part of the framework. They should be built in in an opinionated and first-class way. And we're not

very intellectually consistent about what is included in that rubric. So, you know, we have lots of things that are part of Svelte that are not part of other frameworks, but we don't have any opinions on how you store your content, how you do authentication, like where your data lives, all that sort of thing. And I think one of the ways in which the framework will probably evolve over the next few years is starting to have some of those opinions. There's been a big debate raging in the development world recently about

the meaning of full stack framework and whether any of the current crop of front-end frameworks, Next, Remix, Valkit, all of these things, qualify when you compare them to things like Laravel and Rails, which have been around a lot longer and have a lot more opinions about how to do stuff. And I would say that content is part of that conversation. Like does it belong to the framework or is it something that should be and almost needs

to be kept separately so that you can allow for different solutions to emerge and for people to do experimentation that wouldn't be possible within the confines of the framework itself. So all of that is a long-winded way of saying that we're happy with the fact that people can do basically whatever they need to do today in Svelte and SvelteKit, but there are definitely conversations that we want to have about how we

can make it more of a built-in thing that if you're building an application in SvelteKit, then there is a place to put your content. So it's kind of up for discussion right now. It is, yeah. And it's partly just a question of bandwidth and priorities. You mentioned Astro and 11T. They are frameworks that are very focused on content. Astro sort of identified a gap in the market. A lot of the existing front-end frameworks were focused on how do we build applications that can do all of

these crazy things. And they were under focusing on this basic, like, I just want to put a blog post on the internet. How do I do that? And so they very cleverly came along and said, here's how you do that. Nuxt is sort of the everything framework. They will just add every feature they can think of, and that includes storage and content APIs. And so it's natural that those things exist because they've had the bandwidth and they have