Lisp Web Templating | Hacker News Reader

Lisp Web Templating

18 pointsdualogy6 comments

Yay, after my first week of playing with Lisp I built something that I really like but for ye olde advanced hacker this is probably kiddy stuff.

http://www.roxority.com/roxbase/

Still, I'm so fond of this whole new world I have to announce this small step and (proclaim 'im-on-a-natural-high)

Back to more scientific/biz news / work! ^^

View on HN

Nice work. We've ended up working the other way with our application by generating the html from lisp. The advantage for us being that we can use macros (including extensive nesting) to build entire complex webpages from a very small amount of code dynamically.

Yeah I've seen this method around with CL-WHO and similar approaches. I like the fact that this is one of the many things you can do with macros / s-exprs.

However, for HTML for some reason I wanna keep this out of my code base. Artificial distinction, granted, and now my way I have "code" inside the "template" rather than the "template" inside the "code". I guess I'm just used to doing things this way. Even though I'd never hand over my HTML to an external designer or even edit it in a visual design tool I wouldn't like (with-html (:body (:head (title "Hello World" etc as my "GUI layer". I haven't quite figured out why :)

Anyway, this was fun to write and for the time being will be my preferred way of designing my web apps... ^^ thanks for stopping by though!

It seems to me that Lisp-generated websites tend not to have valid HTML. I've often wondered if there is something about Lisp that makes people averse to valid HTML.

Are there easy ways in Lisp to make sure that you are outputting valid HTML? Like good libraries for escaping text and making sure the proper tags are closed the right ways?

Anyway it's not such a big deal since the sites work fine in browsers. It's more of a passing observation, that really probably extends to other programming languages as well. I just think that something about the structure of Lisp makes HTML/XML feel sloppy and thus there is an unspoken bias towards not worrying about it.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.roxority....

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombina...

Nope, at least in my case the HTML is not Lisp-generated, but hand-written. I use the templating way where occasionally I insert server-side Lisp code in what is otherwise mostly mark-up.

Of course it is not "something about Lisp". The HTML is always generated by a human, either "manually" (as in my template library) or automatically (as in CL-WHO or home-grown s-expression-to-HTML macros).

But you're right, it's not a big deal. What matters is the browser and the user, not the W3C :)

Good Work. I have to second that what attracts me to Lisp/Scheme/Arc for the web is being able to generate the page as s-expr's which are easily converted to html.

Declaritive web programming. Works for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com