ezML, the ez markup language

Info

ezML is still useless, but aspires to be a compact language to generate XML.

Sneak peek

This is what it looks like so far,

html#head {
  head {
    ! Why are you snooping on my webpage?

    title: ezML demo

    / Styles
    / ------
    link,href="/style/theme.css"
        ,rel="stylesheet"
    script,src="/lib/htmx.pre.js"
          ,fetchpriority="high"
          ,integrity="sha2-34"
    / Metadata
    meta,property='og:sad_story'
        ,content="ezML wants to be a real language some day"

    < ./includes.html
    | cat early_script.js | minifier
  }
  body.column.round {
    div#main_column {
      navbar {
      }
      main {
      }
    }
  }

Direction

Syntax

It’d be nice to drop the braces in favor of indent-based blocks like haml or slim.

Editor support

We can highlight using tree-sitter highlight ./path/to/file.zml, but things are not so fun outside the editor. I’d love to have Emacs support, but haven’t dig into it too much. It seems we need to create a file in ~/src/Emacs/lisp/textmodes/ and build Emacs ourselves.

Using ezML

We need to be able to output XML and HTML, but there’s a few problems,

Not all features are supported

We don’t have syntax for writing text into an element, nor for using zml within it.

For instance, generating this cursed title is not possible,

<title>My <b>BIG</b>, <blink>flashy</blink>, and <i>awesome</i> title</title>

No tools use the ezML grammar yet

This is probably a bigger problem. We need to build a tool that at least outputs the XML we have syntax for.

Code

If you are not familiar with tree-sitter you may think this is already big project, it is not, there’s barely the grammar definition and some test data in ./test/corpus/ and ./examples/.

Contributing

This project is a day old, so I don’t truly expect contributors yet.

Since ezML’s design is still in the drawer comments use cases and discussion are better than code.