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Comment by pelme | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for making FastHTML, it is great to see more Python tooling that embraces Python for generating HTML.

What made you build FastTag instead of going with htpy? I am the author of htpy and any feedback would be very welcome!

For what it's worth. One thing I really like about `htpy` is that the element attributes go before the child elements. I find this easier to write and read. Other things I like:

Having child elements as a list (i.e: the __getitem__ override) makes it convenient to build elements based on simple conditions + list comprehensions. This can be done with other frameworks, but it seems more natural to me when using `htpy`.

I also like that you can just `print()` elements and get the final HTML without having to pass it through a different function. This is not something specific about FastHTML, but rather something I've found I also had to do when using `lxml` or similar tools (I wrote about my experiments here[0])

[0]: https://ricardoanderegg.com/posts/python-build-html-componen...

I wrote a few things with each of FT and htpy, and looked at the resulting code -- I felt like the htpy approach was slightly less neat personally. htpy has the benefit that '.' and '#' can have special meanings, but the downside of needing to use both __getitem__ and __call__. I didn't feel like that was a tradeoff I wanted to make. I actually originally wrote FT for a different purpose (XML for language model input) so id and class attributes weren't of any interest at all at that time!

Also, I was able to implement FT using just 2 lines of code -- it felt like a very natural data structure that was a good fit with Python.

Having said all that, I think htpy is really nifty and elegant. :D

Thanks, that makes sense! :)

FastHTML is very interesting and reading this thread has led me to discover htpy as well which I am shocked I have never seen before! The htpy website and docs are also great. So now I am a bit of a dilemma over which one to use.

I actually hate working in HTML with all those closing tags etc so I nearly always set up a build/make process to edit my templates in PUG format. When I paste my PUG->html output into https://h2x.answer.ai/, or run html2htpy over them, I get python code that basically looks the same as those PUG templates. What a realization that is! So I may as well create and edit them in python rather than PUG and exploit the power of my beloved python dev environment and tools (as nicely stated in that "Throw out your templates" essay https://github.com/tavisrudd/throw_out_your_templates reference from the htpy docs). Thanks very much Jeremy and Andreas for this fantastic insight :)

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