this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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Programming
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18% reduction (max) for learning a different language than html? Hard pass.
Especially with css you can give most of those small web design studios (and most wordpress plugins) a run for their money.
I think it’s unnecessary to learn some obscure „alt-sub-language“ if the improvement is so little.
I'm personally a big fan of SCSS over both CSS and regular Sass. Keeps the same syntax so it's not hard to pick up, but fixes some of the CSS jank.
That said, I think they're rolling out a new CSS version that covers some of those tweaks? I recall hearing abt that
CSS has been growing a lot of "super powers" lately, that used to require a pre-processor. Custom properties (variables), nesting,
calc, andcolor-mixused to be things we'd reach for a preprocessor for, but can now be done 100% in pure CSS. And generally, the CSS based versions are better than their old preprocessor counterparts.calccan mix units, so you can easily do things likecalc(100% - 1rem)to subtract a rem from 100% of the parent container. Can't do that in Sass. Custom properties can be set by Javascript, or by media queries, and follow CSS scoping rules. Thats how I handle light/dark mode on my site.That sounds cool! I didn’t know that. Thanks for elaborating.
Karax has the appeal that it is just Nim code, so there is no new syntax.
Nim does a lot of things very well, I love writing JSON and parsing JSON in Nim, probably the best experience I've had with JSON, followed shortly by just implementing it as a protocol in Elixir.
Karax's pattern of just using language constructs to assemble HTML isn't really novel, as nice as it is; Ruby has had one for ages in Builder (and several offshoots), Elixir has Temple, and there are probably some in other languages. They're sort of one level of abstraction less than slim/haml, but its quite pleasant writing them. But they suffer some of the same issues Slim/Haml suffer, but also can suffer when trying to use them with component frameworks, or anything that exposes custom tags. This can, of course, be solved via metaprogramming or language-level templates, but it is a concern
The Temple examples look very nice; the Builder ones to my eye look quite cluttered in comparison, which I'm guessing is due to differences in syntax between their respective languages.
I tink the main downside of templating in general is that it ends up making interfacing with JavaScript and plain HTML harder, compared to CustomElementRegistry based components.
Builder is mostly targeted at building XML files, and so compared to XML its fairly terse. HTML is just a nice also-have. There are template langs in ruby that are a lot closer to the Elixir temple variant, but I can't remember any of them off the top of my head haha.
A good template would make interfacing "easy". JSX[^1] is a very good example of how you can interface quite easily, and the templates used in Surface work really well to bridge some of the complexities of a server-rendered but client-dependent syntax.
[^1]: I know JSX isn't a template language, the differences don't matter for the purpose of this discussion
Well it's pretty much just HTML without brackets and closing tags. There are a few oddities to enable this, and it falls down on inline styles (in the same way json fails vs XML for inline formatting), but it is still pretty fun to write
But with the issues these languages are starting to manifest, that 18% isn't worth it anymore
Thanks for elaborating! :) TIL