Slim VS kdl-rs

I spent a few days of my spare time building a VS Code extension that would bring better syntax highlighting for the Slim template language to the editor. I quite enjoyed most of the process so I’d like to share what I learned.

I think they mean Server Side Rendering (normal rails controllers/views), and Slim is just the name of the templating engine. It's a little nicer than the default ERB. https://github.com/slim-template/slim

There's also SSR with react and other js frameworks, but I don't think that's what they meant.

I use something very similar on https://lunar.fyi and https://lowtechguys.com but I wouldn’t call this “simple” anymore.

They use Jinja templating, I prefer Slim (https://github.com/slim-template/slim#syntax-example) which has a more Pythonic syntax (there is plim [0] in Python for that)

I use Tailwind as well for terse styling and fast experimentation (allows me to write a darkMode-aware and responsive 100 line CSS in a single line with about 10 classes)

For interaction I can write CoffeeScript directly in the page [1] and have it compiled by plim.

I run a Caddy static server [2] and use Syncthing [3] to have every file save deployed instantly to my Hetzner server.

I use entr [4] and livereloadx [5] to rebuild the pages and do hot reload on file save. All the commands are managed in a simple Makefile [6]

———

You can already see how the footnotes take up a large chunk of this comment, this is not my idea of simple. Sure, the end result is readable static HTML and I never have to fight obscure React errors, but it’s a high effort setup for starters.

Simple for me would be: write markdown files for pages, a simple CSS for general styling (should be optional), click to deploy on my domain. Images should automatically be resized to multiple sizes and optimized, videos re-encoded for smaller filesize etc.

I have mostly implemented that for myself (https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/How%20I%20write%20this%20blog...) but it feels fragile. I’d rather pay for a professional solution.

[0] https://plim.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[1] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/src/rcmd...

[2] https://caddyserver.com/docs/command-line#caddy-file-server

[3] https://syncthing.net

[4] https://github.com/eradman/entr

[5] https://nitoyon.github.io/livereloadx/

[6] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/Makefile

Checkout slim https://github.com/slim-template/slim it's a templating language

The template renders the tag and inside it the link and the counter itself (the Slim template language and Tailwind styling are used here, hopefully the notation is sufficiently self-explaining):

This config sets a ”medium“ font weight for our form labels by default. Now, suppose we want a specific input’s label to be bold instead, we might want to try the following naive approach (we’re using the Slim template notation here):

Consider slim: "Slim - A Fast, Lightweight Template Engine for Ruby" http://slim-lang.com and simple_form "GitHub - heartcombo/simple_form: Forms made easy for Rails! It's tied to a simple DSL, with no opinion on markup." https://github.com/heartcombo/simple_form

There are quite a few good ones already but, as it turned out, we hit one blocker or another with each of them. Our biggest issue was that we use Slim in our project, a template format which most of the tools don’t support.

reminds me of slim templates, but not just Ruby

http://slim-lang.com/

I'd love to understand why all the advertised implementations have permissive licenses except for the Rust implementation, which is released under the Parity Public License 7.0.0 [1]? This seems to be as restrictive as the GPL, no?

In my mind, copyleft licenses applied to infrastructural projects like kdl-rs prematurely limits their adoption and promotes the development of alternatives with more permissive licensing, since the spec is released under a Creative Commons license [2].

[1]: https://github.com/kdl-org/kdl-rs/blob/87f836134c1d901ff5ce6...

[2]: https://github.com/kdl-org/kdl/blob/785abebfc507ff6b7bdeac07...

To me it looks amazing, and I was literally about to adopt it in one of my open source Rust-based projects, but then I realized that the Rust version (and only the Rust version) is restrictively licensed under the Parity Public License [1].

I want my open source project to be able to be used in commercial applications, and don't want any of my dependencies' licenses to restrict that.

[1]: https://github.com/kdl-org/kdl-rs/blob/87f836134c1d901ff5ce6...