phpStageManager VS dream-html

"Nobody ever generates JSON using string interpolation." Oh boy, you just took me back to my first ever PHP project. Feast your eyes: https://github.com/oxguy3/phpStageManager/blob/master/events...

This file generates a feed of events (rehearsals for my high school play) to be rendered by the FullCalendar JS plugin. FullCalendar required a particular data schema that didn't match the format of my MySQL table, which meant I couldn't just json_encode() the MySQL results. I guess I just didn't conceptualize that I could create a new object that matched the FullCalendar format, and then call json_encode(). So, I generated JSON with strings.

Honestly it's a toss-up whether the JSON generation is the worst thing about this file. It looks like I also made a separate database query for every single row to get the username, because I apparently didn't know how to do joins. Could probably spend an hour listing some of the other little nuggets of awful in there. But hey, it got the job done! :)

There is some truth to this. Imho the next level of htmx is unlocked when you componentize everything like a React app...but with nested routes corresponding to nested components like a Remix app...and using an HTML generation DSL embedded directly in your language, so HTML becomes a first-class citizen of your language's constructs, rather than a templated afterthought. I have a demo of this: https://github.com/yawaramin/dream-html/tree/todoapp/app

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.

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

I am developing an HTML generation library on top of Dream, to have great support in the language including htmx support: https://yawaramin.github.io/dream-html/dream-html/Dream_html/index.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 miss any.