move old docs over

site/content/docs/00-introduction.md

@@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
+---
+title: Introduction
+---
+
+*Note: Sapper is in early development, and some things may change before we hit version 1.*
+
+### What is Sapper?
+
+Sapper is a framework for building extremely high-performance web apps. You're looking at one right now! There are two basic concepts:
+
+* Each page of your app is a [Svelte](https://svelte.technology) component
+* You create pages by adding files to the `src/routes` directory of your project. These will be server-rendered so that a user's first visit to your app is as fast as possible, then a client-side app takes over
+
+Building an app with all the modern best practices — code-splitting, offline support, server-rendered views with client-side hydration — is fiendishly complicated. Sapper does all the boring stuff for you so that you can get on with the creative part.
+
+You don't need to know Svelte to understand the rest of this guide, but it will help. In short, it's a UI framework that compiles your components to highly optimized vanilla JavaScript. Read the [introductory blog post](https://svelte.technology/blog/frameworks-without-the-framework) and the [guide](https://svelte.technology/guide) to learn more.
+
+
+### Why the name?
+
+In war, the soldiers who build bridges, repair roads, clear minefields and conduct demolitions — all under combat conditions — are known as *sappers*.
+
+For web developers, the stakes are generally lower than for combat engineers. But we face our own hostile environment: underpowered devices, poor network connections, and the complexity inherent in front-end engineering. Sapper, which is short for <b>S</b>velte <b>app</b> mak<b>er</b>, is your courageous and dutiful ally.
+
+
+### Comparison with Next.js
+
+[Next.js](https://github.com/zeit/next.js) is a React framework from [Zeit](https://zeit.co), and is the inspiration for Sapper. There are a few notable differences, however:
+
+* Sapper is powered by Svelte instead of React, so it's faster and your apps are smaller
+* Instead of route masking, we encode route parameters in filenames (see the [routing](guide#routing) section below)
+* As well as *pages*, you can create *server routes* in your `src/routes` directory. This makes it very easy to, for example, add a JSON API such as the one powering this very page (try visiting [/guide.json](/guide.json))
+* Links are just `<a>` elements, rather than framework-specific `<Link>` components. That means, for example, that [this link right here](/), despite being inside a blob of markdown, works with the router as you'd expect
+
+
+### Getting started
+
+The easiest way to start building a Sapper app is to clone the [sapper-template](https://github.com/sveltejs/sapper-template) repo with [degit](https://github.com/Rich-Harris/degit):
+
+```bash
+npx degit sveltejs/sapper-template#rollup my-app
+# or: npx degit sveltejs/sapper-template#webpack my-app
+cd my-app
+npm install
+npm run dev
+```
+
+This will scaffold a new project in the `my-app` directory, install its dependencies, and start a server on [localhost:3000](http://localhost:3000). Try editing the files to get a feel for how everything works – you may not need to bother reading the rest of this guide!