Dynamo is a dead-simple Python HTML generator. I couldn't find a Python module to generate HTML in the quick, functional style that I wanted, so I just wrote my own. There are probably infinitely-better ways to generate HTML underneath the functions provided, and I welcome all suggestions to improve the library. Extra-special props will be given to suggestions that simplify or speed up the generation.
To use, just import dynamo.py at the top of your file (from dynamo import *)
and then start creating tags by wrapping your text in functions representing the
tags you want. It goes like so:
print doctype("html")
print html(
head(
title("My Page, Yo"),
link(href="markup.css", rel="stylesheet", type="text/css", media="all"),
meta(name="description", content="This is my page, yo."),
meta(name="keywords", content="this, is, my, page, awesome, cool"),
meta(charset="UTF-8")
),
body(
comment("Version one of my page, thanks for checking out the source."),
h1("This Is My Page", state="Jolly"),
p({"class": "thing"}, "Check it out, this is a page! It's pretty rad, I'm pretty proud of it, to be honest. I hope you like it!"),
p("There's not much here, I'm just learning, but here's hoping more will come."),
p(),
comment("Important remarks go towards the end."),
p("Chris Vandevelde is super-hot.")
)
)This will print out:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>My Page, Yo</title>
<link media="all" href="markup.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />
<meta content="This is my page, yo." name="description" />
<meta content="this, is, my, page, awesome, cool" name="keywords" />
<meta charset="UTF-8" />
</head>
<body>
<!-- Version one of my page, thanks for checking out the source. -->
<h1 state="Jolly">This Is My Page</h1>
<p class="thing">Check it out, this is a page! It's pretty rad, I'm pretty proud of it, to be honest. I hope you like it!</p>
<p>There's not much here, I'm just learning, but here's hoping more will come.</p>
<p></p>
<!-- Important remarks go towards the end. -->
<p>Chris Vandevelde is super-hot.</p>
</body>
</html>Dynamo will only generate HTML5 elements. Don't bring that <frameset> shit in
here, son, cause we'll knock you out the box.
As of now, Dynamo doesn't do much validation on your end...as in it pretty much doesn't do any. It won't check your style or make things pretty for you, all it really does is limits the tags you can generate to the tags available. I'd be interested in doing some validation in the background, but I'm trying to use this for something so I'll see what I can do at a later time. I take no responsibility for your terrible HTML or if you try to lay everything out using tables like it's 1998.
Dynamo will format HTML for you based the style I was most familiar with when I was writing the library. All self-contained tags go on their own new line, as do tags with one or no children - they can be pretty much inlined. An example of the style can be seen above.
Tabs are done with \ts, which is probably a bad idea, I don't know. If you
want to change it to spaces (and any number of spaces! 4, or 2, or whatever man,
just don't shoot me! Put the gun down, man, it's customizable!), just download
the source and modify the TAB constant. The source is super-tiny, so it's just
in one place.
The syntax style is inspired by (and owes a lot of credit to) the absolute classic Perl module CGI.pm (https://github.com/markstos/CGI.pm), which uses an awesome functional style (see http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/LDS/CGI.pm-3.43/cgi_docs.html for examples.)
Some HTML tags are reserved keywords or functions in Python - it's a bummer.
They are del, input, map, and object; in addition, class is a reserved
keyword and can't be used in tag attributes. You'll be needing it all over the
place if you want to generate any HTML of consequence, so to get around that
limitation, use a capital letter at the start of the word and everthing will be
A-OK. This method works for functions and attributes, although attributes are
freeform so I don't do any lowercasing there.
If you want more flexibility over what words you can use for tag attributes, the easiest way is to pass a dict as the first child; Dynamo will automatically use that as tag attributes for you. For example, Twitter Bootstrap wants hyphens in attributes, which Python won't let you do, and needs to use classes all over the place. To get around that, you can do:
print ul(
{
"class": "dropdown_menu",
"role": "menu",
"aria-labelledBy": "dropdownMenu",
},
(whatever items you want in here)
)which will output
<ul aria-labelledBy="dropdownMenu" role="menu" class="dropdown-menu">
(whatever items you want in here)
</ul>and there you go. Look at that shit, it's beautiful.
The only caveat I've run across is that if you use the sweet Python named arguments, they must go last - it's a caveat of how Python does named arguments with unpacked dicts and whatnot. It feels to have tag attributes at the end, yeah, but you can just use the dict-first method to make everything OK again.
(Fun fact: This was initially coded (almost) in its entirety to Dr. Octagon's Dr. Octagonecologyst. Maybe that explains some things.)