Angular 2 versus React

The foolish, totally avoidable, misguided and completely pointless mistake that Angular 2 made was using a template syntax that was almost but not quite completely unlike HTML:

    
      
        {{hero.name}}
      
    

or:

That is INVALID html and INVALID xml. That means you can't edit or process or generate or validate Angular templates with any of the millions of existing HTML and XML processing tools. They have completely forsaken the entire universe of existing tools, for no good reason.

The Angular 2 template language gets absolutely zero benefits from arbitrarily disobeying HTML syntax. There's nothing about the broken syntax that makes it any more powerful or tangibly convenient that could be done by an HTML or XML compatible syntax.

Maybe it appeals to Perl brogrammers, but the hip stylish syntactic appeal of peppering templates with unique special snowflakes of punctuation like they were so many christmas tree decorations does not outweigh the dire consequence that you can't use an off-the-shelf HTML editor to edit and preview templates, or use any of the many other existing HTML tools to do whatever they're designed to do.

I've encountered Angular 2 proponents who were such blind zealots that they actually refused to see any benefits of sticking to standard syntax and enabling the use of existing tools. They would ask things like "why would you ever want to edit an Angular 2 template in an HTML editor?" or "why would you ever want to generate a template from another meta-template?" or "why wouldn't you want to write your own Angular 2 template validators and editors and processors?" or "why wouldn't you want to retrain all of your html designers who can't use the tools and syntax they're accustom to?"

Yet they were still unable to name any tangible benefits of the broken Angular 2 template syntax, that couldn't be achieved with a non-incompatible HTML syntax.

I'm afraid that they next thing they'll do is invent their own incompatible version of Unicode.

> Do you like functional programming paradigms and want to apply them in writing your components? Use React.

s/React/Elm/g

No, it doesn't play nicely with HTML or XML. It's arbitrarily and pointlessly incompatible with HTML for no good reason, which is a huge easily avoided mistake, that makes me question the judgement of the people who designed (and evangelize) Angular 2. Please see my other posting about that. [1]

My simple question that nobody's been able to answer yet: Name any benefits of the broken Angular 2 template syntax, that couldn't easily be achieved with a non-incompatible, HTML-friendly syntax.

The "Databinding with Web Components" design document [2] makes the dubious claim that "The HTML attribute name of a databound attribute must be escaped in some way."

That is precisely what namespaces are for, so why not simply use namespaces for the purpose they were meant to be used, the same way any well designed standards compliant template languages like Genshi [3] does, instead of inventing a new, non-standard, incompatible syntax?

The entire point of the design of the XML namespace prefix syntax was so that it was compatible with XML syntax. Why do the Angular 2 designers think that was such a bad idea?

I'm not the only person to point this out and have it brushed off and ignored by the Angular 2 team.

"Regardless, it is inappropriate for the angular team to take a hard anti-xml stance." [4]

"I wonder why ngnl presentation and current docs about templates still promoting []()# as parts of new syntax, when opening post in this thread contains 'element.setAttribute('[foo]', 'exp') does not work' and, especially 'SVG requires valid XML and []()# is not valid XML.' If these problems are solved somehow and we just don't know - please let us know." [5]

"Given the lack of xml/SVG compatibility, I would say that the []()# syntax simply fails to meet the constraints, and should be eliminated altogether in favor of the prefix proposal." [6]

"Please don't break HTML syntax :( I love Angular because I can write templates for it in any templating language like SLIM or HAML or Jade (you can't do it in Ember or React, for example). Introducing non-standard characters in attributes makes templating languages unusable (as well as syntax coloring and introspection in IDE)." [7]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10842902

[2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kpuR512G1b0D8egl9245OHaG...

[3] http://genshi.edgewall.org/

[4] https://github.com/angular/angular/issues/133#issuecomment-6...

[5] https://github.com/angular/angular/issues/133#issuecomment-7...

[6] https://github.com/angular/angular/issues/133#issuecomment-7...

[7] https://github.com/angular/angular/issues/133#issuecomment-6...

Great, looking forward to reading these. Thanks!

Kinda beside the point, and I'm not sure the play store is using the same tech stack as play music. Two different things