Then, it is not going to be as static as as static site generators like Jekyll or Hype. One good thing about those sites are that you don't have to serve those static sites from any hosting without any dynamic generation of the web pages.
But, with the feature you request, then, it doesn't really work for a static site generator. It is better to use normal caching with a dynamic site like how Simple is doing now.
I don't think you follow what he is asking for. Jekyll uses CLI-based software to output raw HTML files that can be served to website visitors. Why not create a database (or flat-file) driven CMS, with nice features (e.g. wysiwyg) that then outputs raw HTML files?
So basically just a UI for writing and managing the posts that sits on top of Jekyll.
It's funny, because this is what Movable Type did, back in the day. James Hague echoed your sentiments in "Solving the Wrong Problem": http://prog21.dadgum.com/130.html
Blogger was like that too and I loved it. It's why I've had super basic shared hosting at Dreamhost for so long - it could handle pretty much any traffic by serving up plain HTML.
I'd be curious to see how a "Blogger of today" would fare if it also had Dropbox integration, so you could use specialized local apps like IA Writer if you wanted to but also still write or edit on the go without your main machine.
Yes. That is what most caching feature does. Take Ruby on Rails as example, if you have a static page, you can just cache it as just raw HTML file(after the first rendering).
That's what caching does, but it's not exactly the same use case. Jekyll just generates a folder full of static HTML files that I shoot out to a dumb server that doesn't run Ruby. I'd like continue to do this, and just run a shiny interface locally.
To do the same thing with the cache in a Rails app, I'd probably have to make a script to visit every page to get it to render to the cache, then copy the cache out. At that point, it'd probably be easier to ignore Rails' built-in caching and just to make a rake task that renders everything.
But, with the feature you request, then, it doesn't really work for a static site generator. It is better to use normal caching with a dynamic site like how Simple is doing now.