Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

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What I'd really like to see would be a nice templating language that recognizes and takes advantages of the regular structure of HTML rather than just treats it as a giant string. Can you imagine writing a program using string templating rather than functions, objects and libraries? Sure, it would be possible, but it would be rather awkward...

The closest I've seen to what I want is DRYML: http://hobocentral.net/manual/dryml-guide

The big advantage of DRYML over systems like React & builders is that it has a really nice story for customization. Rather than customizing just through XML attributes, it also has a system for passing in snippets through XML children. But not just snippets for the top component, but but snippets for children of the components you're instantiating.

This has huge advantages for reusability. There are millions of jQuery widgets out there. How come you never use any of them? They never fit the style, behaviour nor requirements of your app. Yet on the server side, you pull in tens of gems, npms, etc from random authors.

DRYML allows customization in both the small and the large. It works well for both defining and customizing <a> tags as well as huge custom components. That huge custom component will use your customized <a> etc, so it automatically picks up your theme and behavior.

DRYML has some major disadvantages though: it's really nice to use, but defining new components looks like line noise. It's also tied to a heavyweight, lightly used framework for Ruby on Rails called Hobo.

One of my many projects abandoned due to lack of time is a port of DRYML's "standard library" Rapid to React. React isn't quite as nice as DRYML for re-use and customization, but it has a large number of advantages in popularity, speed and readability. If anybody else is interested in the project, give me a shout.

The Enlive scraping/templating library for Clojure can be used in a pretty novel way to generate templates. I guess it's a bit like transforming XML with XSLT, except without the need for an intermediary language (in favor of a DSL in Clojure).

Templating with Enlive takes regular old HTML, which could even be mockups of your ui, and a list of (selector, transform) pairs to apply to it. The selectors mostly mimic CSS, while the transforms come with a library to manipulate node attributes, contents, etc. Taking a non-functional form and setting its method and action might look like this:

    [:form#my-form] (enlive/set-attr :action "." :method "POST")

My favorite part of using enlive is that it removes almost all responsibility from any frontend developers to know about the templating. They can just produce straight HTML mockups with enough CSS hooks for you to get in and change what needs changing. I even use it on projects that I don't envision anyone else working on -- it's nice not to have to context-switch between design and development all the time.

There were a whole family of older template systems that worked on this model. They suck because in practice they are much more restrictive, difficult to work with, and in most cases inefficient, since fundamentally they are working in the domain of a fully parsed node graph, instead of simply being lightweight control structures for basically memcpy().

See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_Attribute_Language

On the flexibility front, the same template language (and especially ones with good whitespace control, e.g. Jinja2) can be used for any text-like format. If browser or device quirks force you to emit invalid XML to trigger some desired behavior, you don't end up in a fight with your perfectionist templating system (and probably resorting to regexes over its output) to achieve the desired result.

I'd say (and probably, a younger version of myself turns in his grave as I say it) that in this case, worse turns out to be much better.

TAL as it was implemented for ZOPE was a total abortion (especially when they threw in other crap to make up for its gaping weaknesses like TALES, METAL, and those goofy expression what were not anything like any other language, plus "acquisition" which was a terrible and useless approach to scoping). The ZOPE stack's approach to templating and scoping and components and their entire way of thinking about it was totally demented and wrong headed. I used it a lot in my wild and crazy ZOPE days, and I hated it then and won't ever go back.

On the other hand, there are other similar attribute based xml templating languages that are much much better, because they didn't try to reinvent the wheel out of tapioca and rusty iron filings, but instead they simply acted as a thin veneer over Python, so everything you knew about and could do in Python applied without any distortion or unnecessarily creative reinterpretation.

Specifically, TurboGears used the "Kid" templating language, the next generation of which was re-implemented as "Genshi". I have used both extensively, and although they do have some problems and limitations (many of which Genshi addressed), I really like them a lot, and they are easy to use and think about, and not so full of surprises and disappointments as the horrible stuff from ZOPE that they (distantly) descended from. I've used Kid and then Genshi in large template-heavy projects over many years, and I still use Genshi and like it. It is actually quite elegant and minimalistic, and super easy to learn.

http://genshi.edgewall.org/

Genshi operates on pure clean XML internally, has real Python loops, conditionals, variables, functions, parameter passing and extensibility, and has plug-in serializers for various formats like XML, XHTML and HTML5, that know about all the formatting rules and conventions and browser quirks and superstitions like <BR />, and never produce incorrectly quoted or formatted content. You can also use it to product plain text as well as markup.

Yet client-side React is faster than string template languages for most practical purposes.

And rarely is speed the most important attribute of a template language. If it was, we'd be writing all of our server code in C.

At least for DRYML, it only requires valid XML on input, it can emit any string on output.

But in essence, you're right. String templating languages have been more successful than TAL or DRYML. But my belief is that's because we just haven't done it properly yet. TAL suffers XML disease, and DRYML has other problems.

Don't you avoid needing to work on a fully parsed node graph if you proccess data using streams/events? Kind of like how SAX parsers avoid creating a DOM tree in memory.

I think Genshi does something similar to this but I'm not 100% sure.

I agree completely, which is what I did with my own binding library (which is supposedly going to be open-sourced in early 2015). The templating language is HTML (which can be viewed and styled normally) with a few custom data- attributes, the logic is Javascript. No extra silly half-assed languages to learn (aren't HTML, CSS, and Javascript enough?). The entire library is under 7kB minified (less gzipped) and does one-way (read-only) and two-way (live-updated) binding without changing the underlying object.

To bind an object to a chunk of DOM (it leverages jQuery) you simple do something like $(selector).bindomatic(object) and you're done. (If you need additional logic, you pass it on the side in an options object.)

> What I'd really like to see would be a nice templating language that recognizes and takes advantages of the regular structure of HTML rather than just treats it as a giant string.

A webpage is a giant string.HTTP is a giant string over tcp. And you dont need all your complicated stuff if you dont like "giant strings".

There is already something called XSL that can transform structured data into anything else.You just choosed to ignore it in your rant.

Sounds similar to the Web Components which allows you to define insertion points in the templates.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-components-intro-20130606/#inse...

http://webcomponents.org/

Have you looked at Apache Jelly[1]? This is a server side templating language in itself.

[1] http://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-jelly/

There is either Lift (for Scala) or AngularJs - both might be something of what you are looking for.

Try Yesod.

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