dream-html

Nowadays I highly recommend HTML embedding libraries directly in the programming language. E.g. ScalaTags https://com-lihaoyi.github.io/scalatags/ or (my own) https://github.com/yawaramin/dream-html Yes, you give up the ability of designers and frontend-only people to easily work with the HTML templates. But in exchange you get quite a lot.

> templating languages are horrible and stuck in 2005. An underrated pro of react [1] + typescript is that you get to write your UI logic in regular typescript, Yeah exactly, which is why I always recommend DSLs that embed HTML directly in the language. E.g. https://com-lihaoyi.github.io/scalatags/ or (my own) https://github.com/yawaramin/dream-html They make writing HTML a breeze with the full power of the programming language available. > We were doing this the same year that React came out, and clearly had some of the same thoughts as Dan Abramov did Dan Abramov is not the original creator of React. That was Jordan Walke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GW0rj4sNH2w

(2020) Folks, this is exactly what htmx (and Phoenix LiveView and Laravel Livewire and Rails Hotwire) solves. OP was almost there but couldn't quite articulate this niche. Which is OK, we have the benefit of hindsight now. Try htmx. It will blow you away with its simplicity compared to (today's) React. My personal recommendation: try it with dream-html, a library I wrote for expressing HTML directly in the language: https://github.com/yawaramin/dream-html (or some similar library).

I found your article very informative and it matches up quite a bit with my own thinking about HTML generation. In fact it looks like we independently arrived at pretty much the same conclusions. A lot of the issues you raise are the impetus behind the way I designed my HTML-generation DSL: https://github.com/yawaramin/dream-html

Look at this code which prints out an HTML tag: https://github.com/yawaramin/dream-html/blob/main/lib/dream_... Initially you might think generating HTML tags from data structures in code should be a simple matter. But there are complexities--some tags are defined as having no child tags, others do. Some tags are purely character data (unstructured text), not structured data. Some are just comments. We need a way to compose multiple tags together into a single 'virtual' tag for flexible HTML generation. All these conditions can be pretty hard to keep track of--unless your compiler does exhaustiveness checking. Then the compiler will tell you if you missed any cases. In the example above I didn't make any manual effort to cover all the cases, I simple listed out the cases I wanted to handle in order. The compiler made sure that I didn't mi