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Draft/pseudocode for HTML type provider
// https://twitter.com/mausch/status/406420573518970880
// compiles to ModelLayout -> XElement where ModelLayout = { title: string; script: XAttribute; bodyAttrs: XAttribute list; body: XElement }
type Layout = HTML<"""
<html>
<head>
<title><x:text id="title"/></title>
<script x:attr="script"></script>
</head>
<body x:attrs="bodyAttrs">
<x:elem id="body"/>
</body>
</html>
""">
@mausch
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mausch commented Nov 29, 2013

Or compile Layout to a class with a method Render that has that ModelLayout -> XElement function, same thing.

@panesofglass
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Would XElement still work if you add the doctype? What if you use HTML5 and not XHTML5?

Otherwise, that is what I was thinking, too.

Also, do you like this better than a generated form of Wing Beats?

@panesofglass
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Do you need the different replacement symbols? How many were you thinking?

@mausch
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mausch commented Nov 29, 2013

Good point: if there is a doctype, it has to compile to a XDocument.
No idea what a generated form of Wing Beats would look like.
Updated to make it simpler to parse and implement.
Other than the ones shown, I would also include XElement list.

@mausch
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mausch commented Nov 29, 2013

A variant of this would also be useful as a poor-man's macro for formlets.

@panesofglass
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Goal should be that I could take a layout from a designer and use it almost directly. This introduces a lot of new syntax.

@mausch
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mausch commented Nov 29, 2013

I don't see any new syntax here. It's just HTML with some attributes/elements in a different namespace. You can take a layout from a designer directly (which would compile to a XElement or XDocument), then start adding holes for composition.

@panesofglass
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I see. That's not bad. What about using data- attributes or {{...}} bindings?

Also, I like the idea of using a Render function that takes an instance of the model.

@panesofglass
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I just saw your comment about formlets. That is an interesting idea. Sort of like Yesod's widgets?

@mausch
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mausch commented Nov 29, 2013

But data-xxx attributes are valid, regular HTML, so they can't be used for server-side templating. The templating syntax has to be completely lifted. {{...}} can also be regular text and can't differentiate text from a single element from multiple elements, make it harder to parse/implement, would need an escaping mechanism, and I thought you wanted to avoid special syntax :)

Yesod widgets are more about componentization, i.e. bundling HTML+CSS+JS, declaring dependencies, and making such bundles safely composable. It's a separate, orthogonal task.

My reference to formlets was aimed at implementing some poor-man's form of Links formlets sugar (example). I say "poor-man's" because you need full-blown macros to implement this properly (IIRC the original formlets implementation used camlp4 for such sugar).

@colinbull
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Hey, I had a similar idea a while ago and wrote a HTML parser to start this but never got the chance to actually lift it into a type provider. Have a look a this.. FSharpEnt Html maybe a starting point. I was thinking of just being able to replace elements directly via the type provider using the DOM module provided or maybe some HTML builder via a computation expression.. Just thinking out loud really..

@panesofglass
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@colinbull that is where I would really like to end up.

@panesofglass
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@mausch I misspoke. I'm not opposed to new syntax. I meant to question the use of additional namespaces. That is rather uncommon now. I was happy with the additional symbols, so long as they are known or easily findable. I was also wondering whether multiple were needed or whether one might work with a bit more contextual inference.

@mausch
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mausch commented Dec 2, 2013

I realized that what I actually want is XML literals. I really don't care about non-XML HTML so I just use the System.Xml.Linq parser. I just started implementing it here: https://github.com/mausch/XmlLiteralsTypeProvider

After implementing holes for elements/attributes, it would be very interesting to be able to read templates from a file. That way, you'd keep templates in a file, which anyone could edit outside of a development environment but any changes to its holes would affect compilation as it should.

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