Scalatags VS 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.

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.