To me the idea of “sylvan” is a tool meant to easily create beautiful sites with org-mode, while remaining unintrusive. For that reason, I am exploring some alternative, non-NextJS options for Sylvan. There’s a few reasons for this:

1. As I’ve expressed before, I’m not 100% thrilled with Sylvan as it exists today

2. As I’ve expressed before, I’d love for a more emacs-centric tooling, but I dislike the constraints of ox-html

3. I am taking a new job on October 10th and my primary frontend framework will be lit.dev, and I think there could be a far more interesting future for Sylvan in the world of web-components

4. NextJS can produce static sites, but it’s very difficult to coax it into that box, and I’d prefer a site that’s statically compiled

So to this end, I am experimenting with new options for the idea of Sylvan. My current experiments involve augmenting ox-html by deriving a new export backend for org-mode from it. The current working theory is that any element can be templated, if desired, and if it is templated than Sylvan will use that template file as its definition for that org element. Any elements not defined will fallback to the ox-html element. I’m not sure if this is even possible, but I’m going to give it a shot and see what I can do!