Beautiful mini language for outputing HTML in Python • Hacker News Board

Re: Beautiful mini language for outputing HTML in Python

#71

Post by prodigal_erik » Thu, Dec 31, 2009, 9:03 AM UTC

showell wrote: post #55

prodigal_erik wrote: post #53

I'm disappointed they resorted to a one-way preprocessor. Is it really not feasible to make a first-class domain-specific language like this in Python?

The reason I made SHPAML a one-way preprocessor is that my use cases haven't yet given me a compelling reason to write a round tripper, and preprocessing is simple to automate. I do not know what your criteria are for judging a "first-class" DSL in Python, so I cannot comment on the feasibility. My goal was to create a simple markup language that maps well to HTML and plays nice with templates. SHPAML does that.

Sorry, I misread the title "Beautiful mini language for outputing HTML in Python" as a DSL to be embedded in Python code rather than a separate text file (which is actually language agnostic after the preprocessor is done).

Re: Beautiful mini language for outputing HTML in Python

#72

Post by showell » Thu, Dec 31, 2009, 11:30 PM UTC

julius_geezer wrote: post #11

tpyo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did Hoffman and Kernighan meet?

Pulling your leg. Hoffman, who had learned in the "method acting" schools, apparently stayed up all night to look properly harrowed for a scene. Laurence Olivier, playing opposite, is said to have told him something like "Why don't you try acting, my boy? It's so much simpler."

The Laurnence Olivier analogy is stupid, inaccurate, and irrelevant.

Re: Beautiful mini language for outputing HTML in Python

#73

Post by showell » Thu, Dec 31, 2009, 11:38 PM UTC

prodigal_erik wrote: post #71

showell wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I made SHPAML a one-way preprocessor is that my use cases haven't yet given me a compelling reason to write a round tripper, and preprocessing is simple to automate. I do not know what your criteria are for judging a "first-class" DSL in Python, so I cannot comment on the feasibility. My goal was to create a simple markup language that maps well to HTML and plays nice with templates. SHPAML does that.

Sorry, I misread the title "Beautiful mini language for outputing HTML in Python" as a DSL to be embedded in Python code rather than a separate text file (which is actually language agnostic after the preprocessor is done).

No worries. I am actually curious to your thoughts about DSLs. I love Python, but it is not really optimized for DSLs. You can obviously implement a DSL in Python, but embedding it is another story.

Re: Beautiful mini language for outputing HTML in Python

#74

Post by alan_p » Fri, Jan 22, 2010, 8:30 AM UTC

omouse wrote: post #64

samdk wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difficulty of writing HTML is mostly having to type too much. Writing HTML isn't programming.

HTML isn't meant to be written directly. It's an output form, like Postscript or PDF.

Gravedigging a bit here, but WTF dude?

I've started authoring websites in 1996 with just Notepad and I still hand-write my HTML on a daily basis.

The problem with HTML has been (and will be, for a long time) that there is no WYSIWYG editor that can offer quite the same quality as handwritten HTML.

In fact, if you're dealing with HTML from a WYSIWYG perspective, you're most likely ignorant of the language. The distinctions between divisions and paragraphs, between links and spans, are not something that is adequately reflected by an input editor purely concerned with visuals.

Just as the purpose of CleverCSS or it's Ruby predecessor is making it easier to write CSS by cutting down on the redundancy (and even by increasing the level of abstraction a fair bit), the purpose of SHPAML is making it easier to write HTML by cutting down on the redundancy of closing tags, angle brackets and the verbosity of divs, spans, ids and classes, thus letting you express more directly what you mean.

You don't have to like it. It's mostly a stylistic choice, but it means little overhead and can help HTML authors a lot by cutting down on the usual boilerplate. Just like frameworks and syntactic sugar make it easier for programmers (though the argument could easily be applied to them as well -- how dare they find it easier to code with less boilerplate if the actual writing is the smallest part in creating a functioning program).