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by gxonatano
699 days ago
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You don't need to make your markup language programmable. Just write a library for a full-featured programming language which outputs the markup you want. Then you don't have to re-implement parameters, variables, loops, and such. See Lucid or Blaze in Haskell for good HTML DSLs. You can do more in one of those, combined with all the features of Haskell, than you can with Slab, Haml, Pug, or whatever else. And you don't need to write plugins for VSCode, Vim, Emacs, or whatever else just to edit it. See also Elm, which has an HTML DSL built in. |
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Two, although it's possible to introspect a blaze-html -generated tree, you can't easily have tooling to, say, list HTML fragments, where they are used, which one are full HTML documents (i.e. starting with a doctype)... One of my goal with Slab is to have a "refactorable" language to write "large" HTML code bases (I'm mainly thinking of design systems reference implementations). Having a tool that can "see" the tree structure, the fragment calls, the list of files, ... opens new tooling opportunities.
I'm one of those people that says syntax doesn't matter; we should talk about semantic instead (and thus just adopt s-expressions for syntax). Yet, in this case, I think that a very lightweight syntax that maps clearly to HTML, in particular for non-programmers (e.g. designers), is very valuable.
Note also that I make available a statically-linked `slab` binary that makes super easy to start using Slab. You don't need a programming environment with a compiler and so on. (I'd like to try to create a Cosmopolitan[2] binary in the future.)
The `slab` binary also has a "watch" feature that rebuilds pages and reload the browse as you edit `.slab` files. I guess I mean that having an integrated tool can offer a very good developer (or designer ?) experience.
[1]: https://github.com/hypered/slab/blob/main/content/reference....
[2]: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan