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Comment by bradleyland | Hacker News Reader

It would seem possible to write a Lisp library that does exactly what you described; albeit indirectly. The library would interpret Lisp data structures and return well-formed XHTML. Think Haml, only Lisp. If someone were interested in doing this, they should definitely have a look at Haml though. There are some interesting methods for telling the Haml interpreter how you want the content handled. Built-in support for escaping characters, expansion/non-expansion, etc is really nice.

I know very little about Lisp, so this type of thing might already exist.

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There are already lisp/scheme libraries out there that do that. The smalltalk framework's Seaside and Illiad both contain the same as well.

as a basic example from seaside:

renderContentOn: html

    html heading level: 1; with: 'Hello World!'.

creates

<h1>Hello World</h1>

More on how Seaside generates html can be found at:

http://seaside.st/documentation/generating-html

Here is an example from racket ( aka plt scheme ):

(define (build-request-page label next-url hidden) `(html (head (title "Enter a Number to Add")) (body ([bgcolor "white"]) (form ([action ,next-url] [method "get"]) ,label (input ([type "text"] [name "number"] [value ""])) (input ([type "hidden"] [name "hidden"] [value ,hidden])) (input ([type "submit"] [name "enter"] [value "Enter"]))))))

More ( and the proper formatting of the above ) can be seen at:

http://docs.racket-lang.org/more/#(part.__.Hello_.World__.Se...

And there are also libraries in other languages as well. For eg:

* There's Builders in Groovy (http://groovy.codehaus.org/Builders)

* Markaby in Ruby (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markaby)

* and Markapl and Template::Declare in Perl (http://search.cpan.org/perldoc/Markapl & http://search.cpan.org/perldoc/Template%3A%3ADeclare).

Here is the snippet in blogpost using Markapl:

    div('.red') {
        p { "hello world" }
    }

Also see related HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=705698

My only problem with markaby is that all the do ... end for blocks sort of defeats the purpose for me. not completely but partially. that said, i often use it.

There are probably dozens lisp libraries that do exactly this. Pretty much every lisp developer writes one.

A bunch can be found here: http://www.cliki.net/Lisp%20Markup%20Languages

Examples: http://www.cliki.net/HTML-TEMPLATE http://www.nicklevine.org/play/xhtml.lisp http://www.cliki.net/yaclml http://www.cliki.net/CL-WHO

Yes, they do exist. Check, for instance: http://weitz.de/cl-who/ and http://weitz.de/cl-who/

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