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Comment by serverQuestion | Hacker News Reader

one of the difficult things is extracting and reusing data inside of html documents. So after you've written the html file it's done, you can't reuse it in a different page, no api nothing. let's day you want to reorder / filter a list it's impossible

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What?

OK. You have a mere CSV file with data. What you're stating about HTML is true for the CSV file - _on it's own_.

HTML is nothing more, than a data structure, and fairly good one.

Not only that, but their assertion isn't even true. It's as if there's an HTML renderer that doesn't support iframes, template tags, or JavaScript...

Some might say the latter is cheating, but HTML isn't a programming language.

Could you expand on what you mean by this?

I don't know if this is a case you had in mind, but I'm increasingly frustrated with the inflexibility of table-based data in HTML.

With JS support, it's possible to create dynamic tables -- sortable, searchable, filterable, summarisable (sum, mean, count, etc.). But none of that is available in stock HTML + browser. It would be quite useful.

Similar features might be envisioned for ordered or unordered lists.

As would be the ability to simply extract content from HTML tables. There are some tools offered for this, but relatively few, and largely arcane, especially for nontechnical users.

With Hugo this is no problem and still can be standard HTML.

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