It’s just a word to evoke the idea that serving as much as you can statically while using client-side code and hitting serverless APIs for any needs after that.
The “official website” changed their language from JAMstack (evoking the JavaScript, APIs, and Markup acronym) to Jamstack. It’s nothing to be overly concerned about, but I care as someone who has to write the word in a professional context quite often. If we’re going to “Jamstack,” so be it.
There are all kinds of tech words like this to remember to get right:
- It’s Sass, not SASS.
- It’s Less, not LESS.
- It’s JavaScript, not Javascript.
- It’s WordPress, not WordPress. (LOLZ WordPress won’t let you spell it wrong. Imagine a lowercase “p”.)
- It’s webpack, not Webpack.
- It’s npm, not NPM.
- It’s CodePen, not Codepen.
- It’s CSS-Tricks, not CSS Tricks
Phil offered this in the Jamstack Slack:
I’d just offer this one comparison:
Ajax.
When I first started using Ajax, it was always called “AJAX” and stood for Async JavaScript And XML. Over time, JSON became more popular than XML with this pattern, but we still called it the same thing. And these days we’d refer to it as “Ajax” (if at all, lol) because what it stands for is more than what the acronym consists of.