html-strong

Opinionated, strongly typed HTML suitable for server side rendering and templating.

Early WIP.

Why?

I wanted to learn more about web development and write Rust at the same time.

What does it look like

TODO.

See the Axum hello world example.

See the Hacker News clone example (WIP).

Features

Strongly typed

Gives us IDE support and compile time guarantees.

No user-facing macros

Most templating libraries I've seen do this. I wanted to avoid this because some macros break rust-analyzer.

Also, domain specific languages carry an extra cognitive load that I'm not always interested in having.

Templating is Rust code

Create HTML dynamically using normal Rust control loops.

Future efforts

Ergonomics

Try finding improvements.

Example:

o(Td::default())
	.add_class("subtext")
	.kid(score_span)
	.add_text(" by ")
	.kid(user_href)
	.add_text(ONE_SPACE)
	.kid(unv_span)
	.add_text(PIPE_DELIMITER)
	.kid(hide_a)
	.add_text(PIPE_DELIMITER)

Would look better as:

o(Td
	.class("subtext")
	.kid(score_span)
	.text(" by ")
	.kid(user_href)
	.text(ONE_SPACE)
	.kid(unv_span)
	.text(PIPE_DELIMITER)
	.kid(hide_a)
	.text(PIPE_DELIMITER)

All tag struct implement the Tag trait.

If we use an extension trait, we should be able to make e.g. class available for any struct which implements Tag.

Missing stuff

Lots of tags and attributes are missing. Add them as we go.

Optimization pass

I ❤️ "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good". Allocate and box stuff liberally, then benchmark later and see where/if optimization are needed.

Caching

Try using the cached library (in examples) to see if we can get a nice pattern going for not having to re-render templates all the time.

Figure out CSS

What do we do about CSS?

• Ignore it? We can already set an id and add classes to tags, the user can then handle CSS.
• Find an API for adding style to tags?
• Attempt a similar API (or library) for writing CSS?