For what it's worth, I'm entirely in agreement with you about HTML templating.

Any sufficiently mature templating language starts to exhibit signs of following Greenspun's tenth rule. It acquires bits of syntax for conditionals, looping and so on. They become Turing complete. And if I want to generate my HTML using a Turing-complete language, I've already got one right in front of me: Perl.

I do use templates occasionally. And when I do, I tend to use Text::Template which allows me to embed Perl in the templates thank-you-very-much and not some poorly designed ersatz scripting language.

But that's only occasionally; and not usually for outputting HTML, but for outputting other formats. Why? Because of the other thing I dislike about templating...

The other thing I dislike about templating is that it composes HTML using a linear, string-like paradigm, whereas an HTML document is really a tree-like structure that just happens to have been serialized down to a string.

If I have a template like:

  <div style="color:red">[% ... %]</div>

[download]

Then I have no confidence that the end </div> tag will end up closing the initial start <div> tag. The stuff within the [% ... %] may well do something like </div><div>. It's simply a flaky way to compose a tree. If I do this:

  div( ... );

[download]

... and div() is written to return a DOM node, and all the parameters passed to it are DOM nodes, then I know my resulting document is going to be sane.

My own attempt to write something along the lines of what Lady_Aleena has done above, is HTML::HTML5::Builder.

Basic usage is along these lines...

use HTML::HTML5::Builder qw[:standard];

my @things = (
  "raindrops on roses",
  "whiskers on kittens",
  "bright copper kettles",
  "warm woollen mittens",
);

print html(
  -lang => 'en',
  head(
    title('Test'),
    Meta(-charset => 'utf-8'),
  ),
  body(
    h1('Test'),
    p('Here are a few of my favourite things...'),
    ul(map li($_), @things),
  ),
);

[download]

The module really needs a revisit. The problem is that many HTML elements have names that conflict with Perl's built-ins (tr, map, etc). Right now, HTML::HTML5::Builder exports some of these as capitalized functions to deal with that issue, but I'm not especially happy with the current solution.

package Cow { use Moo; has name => (is => 'lazy', default => sub { 'Mooington' }) } say Cow->new->name

In reply to Re^3: RFC: Proofread the POD for my HTML elements module by tobyink
in thread RFC: Proofread the POD for my HTML elements module by Lady_Aleena

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.