DOMBuilder

An interesting native approach; there have been library-based approaches to this that date back a while. Laconic (https://github.com/joestelmach/laconic) is one of the oldest that I'm aware of, and suffers from some jsquery-ness: $.el.div({'class' : 'example'}, $.el.div('content')); Pithy (https://github.com/caolan/pithy) is another; uses function syntax to get the effect of the tag name. This was discussed previously on hn, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5486239 html.div('#main', [ html.h1(null, 'Hello, world!'), html.img({src: 'foo.jpg'}) ]); In that discussion, there are various other implementations of similar ideas - https://github.com/markgandolfo/el.js and https://github.com/insin/DOMBuilder and https://github.com/jed/domo and so on. el.js came to my attention a long time ago, and I ended up

Also there is DOMBuilder https://github.com/insin/DOMBuilder which has separate modes for using HTML mock elements on (node.js) server-side or DOM elements in browsers. The mock elements are implementing only a very small set of the DOM functions, but if you extend it a little then it can be useful to share Backbone-like views between server and client.

Here's another one I did: https://github.com/insin/DOMBuilder/ It also allows you to generate HTML strings from the same code and create templates, with template inheritance, using the same sort of syntax.

I have a library for this sort of thing (but without the HAML-style # and . niceties :-/) which can also output DOM Elements or HTML (escaped by default) from the same code by flipping its output mode: https://github.com/insin/DOMBuilder The output modes are implemented as plugins, so you can also add other sorts of things, like the template mode I'm in the progress of writing, with template inheritance and the like. Bretthopper's comment about the readability is spot on, though - you have to start using comma-first pretty quickly or you will go mad getting commas in the right places, and you're never going to get a designer writing these things. The good thing about it is that since your templates are written in code, it's trivial to share them between client and server - this example app can also be clones and run on Node.js, which uses

Sure there are - why are so many Crockford pronouncements taken as a signal to stop thinking? Notice that his "with is bad" examples (which are usually bad examples and bad usages [1]) always involve contrived examples of potentially ambiguous assignment - one of the more useful ways to use `with` is with objects whose properties are DSL-like functions, named in such a way that there's no mistaking their origin and with no ambiguous assignment involved. Simple example with includes: https://github.com/insin/DOMBuilder/blob/master/examples/red... More extensive example of inheritable templates for a CRUD admin app: https://github.com/insin/sacrum/blob/master/lib/sacrum/admin... [1] http://webreflection.blogspot.com/2009/12/with-worlds-most-m...