alt Hacker NewsHard not to laugh out loud at "We know what good syntax for templating looks like." We don't. Not even close. Because I'd hazard a good template is almost certainly more of a visual thing than it is a symbolic one. Is why dreamweaver and such was so successful back in the day. And why so many designers learn with tools like photoshop.
Also hard not to feel like this is reaching hard to try and recreate xslt. :( It is inevitable that someone will want to template something that isn't well formed, but can combine into a well formed thing. And then you are stuck trying to find how to do it. (Or correlated entities on a page that are linked, but not on the same tree, as it were. Think "label" and "for" as an easy example in plain markup.)
If I could wave my magic wand, what we need is fewer attempts to make templates all fit in with the rube goldberg that is the standard document layout for markup. People will go through obscene lengths to recreate what judicious use of absolute positioning can achieve fairly well. Sure, you might have to do math to get things to fit, but why do we feel that is something that we have to force the machine to do again and again and again on the same data?
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> Hard not to laugh out loud at "We know what good syntax for templating looks like." We don't. Not even close. Because I'd hazard a good template is almost certainly more of a visual thing than it is a symbolic one.
How do you come to this conclusion? It seems to me that what you mean is a general gripe with HTML+CSS, not with how it's generated.
And why do you bring up absolute positioning?
I hear this take on HN again and again and sure, absolute positioning has its place, and is needed for many things.
But when it's used for page/app layout, most of the time I came across this it was an absolute nightmare, falling apart at the slightest content (even text!) or screen size changes.
Even print newspaper layout can't work like this, because typography is involved, although it's probably a lot closer to what I imagine you are describing.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you.
But when I was doing more CSS-intensive work (I still do a fair bit), developing something on a basis when someone created a layout based on absolute positioning that looked like it was "almost ready", it was a terrible time sink to try to fix it and recreating it using flex, flow et al for layout (I'm not that fond of grid outside of some scenarios, and at the time I didn't use it due to browser support) was always faster because the problems with absolute positioning as the main layout tool were basically unfixable.
Maybe there are techniques using calc() and viewport units where it makes sense, but absolute positioning is not suitable for any layout outside of completely static content and viewport dimensions, in my experience.
> People will go through obscene lengths to recreate what judicious use of absolute positioning can achieve fairly well
the web has the requirement that the 'document' look good no matter what device size/dimension, orientation, and/or capability.
In regular apps (say, a windows app), you don't have this requirement. In mobile apps, there's a standardized set of sizes. Only on web do we have both!
> Hard not to laugh out loud at "We know what good syntax for templating looks like."
First of all, it's not very nice to laugh in the face of someone advocating for progress on the web platform, which benefits everyone.
Second of all, yes we do now know what good syntax for templating is, it's basically jsx (and I'm saying this as someone who's really not a fan of React). It took the whole web by storm, it's been adapted for all kinds of frameworks, and it's undeniable that all js templating systems converged towards common attributes: templates-as-expressions, composition via nesting and control flow with just javascript (instead of specific template syntax).
We do know what is good. We may not know what is perfect, but perfect need not be the enemy of good.
We don't know what good syntax for templating looks like because HTML is complex enough and many have tried making it more complex with things like Blade for PHP or HTMX for example. For some reason I've always preferred JS to HTML. React components with JSX is a good balance. Not everyone agrees but that's OK.
> Hard not to laugh out loud at "We know what good syntax for templating looks like." We don't.
The article fails to accept that performance and security aren’t addressed by vanity layers. This is a mistake repeated by web technologies when popular demand eventually crushes common sense, because hiring is more important than training/maintenance when the lowest levels of the work force can’t tell the difference and drives all design decisions.
If you want better performance or security you have to measure things, not wear a pretty dress and look the other way.
> Also hard not to feel like this is reaching hard to try and recreate xslt.
I was never a fan of XML, but XSLT was (is!) a killer redeeming feature of the ecosystem. And it's still widely supported in browsers! It was such a shame that XML caught on where it sucked--configuration, IPC, etc--but languished where it shined, as a markup language with an amazing transformation capability in XSLT.
I think where XSLT fell over was that it's a real DSL, and a declarative, pure, functional DSL at that. People like to talk a big game about DSLs, but inevitably they're simplistic syntactic exercises that don't actually abstract the underlying procedural semantics of popular host languages. When faced with a well-designed DSL that makes difficult tasks trivial... people can't be bothered to learn.