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The time is right for a DOM templating API

(justinfagnani.com)
218 points mdhb | 3 comments | 26 Jun 25 19:23 UTC | HN request time: 0.644s | source
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taeric ◴[26 Jun 25 23:50 UTC] No.44392596[source]▶
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. 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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1. chii ◴[27 Jun 25 09:10 UTC] No.44395166[source]▶
> 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!

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2. taeric ◴[27 Jun 25 13:46 UTC] No.44396785[source]▶
Not really? People impose the idea that they can make this work. Yet no sites looked good on the Nintendo DS browser, and people were largely ok with that. Few sites look genuinely good on phones. People are largely ok with that.
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3. DangitBobby ◴[27 Jun 25 18:50 UTC] No.44399243[source]▶
The Nintendo DS browser was not good enough to use as a daily driver. My phone, on the other hand, I spend more time browsing on that than I do my computer. Some sites aren't great on it, but the vast majority are fine (reader mode will get you through 99% of the rest). I'd argue most sites don't "look good" on any device. It's really not that hard these days to make a site work on mobile, the navbar often is the most challenging part of it.