‘Iacta alea est’

Hypertext DSL: Nested Templates

After yesterday’s post exploring using the Hypertext DSL as a templating engine, a new version of Hypertext was released (0.0.4). It incorporates a variant of the monkey patch I had presented using an append method to allow nested templates:

class Hypertext
  …  
  def append(value)
     @dom.push(*value)
  end
  …
end

class Hypertext::DSL
  …
  def append(content)
    @ht.append(content)
  end
  …
end

It’s nice to see this officially land. An email with an idea from Mr. Martens, and then a blog post from me exploring the idea, and now an extension of the library to assimilate what was learned.

The one difference is that my implementation of Hypertext#append added the fragment as an element to the @dom array (@dom << fragment) whereas Mr Marten’s official version prefers @dom.push(*fragment). This is a subtle difference which ensures the indentation remains consistent.

I have been thinking of different approaches to encapsulating templates and exposing variables to templates.

One is to use Markaby’s approach of a template method which loads a file and evaluates it in a certain context.

Another is to wrap templates in classes and expose instance variables which is perhaps a nod in the direction of Rails.

Yet another, similar to yesterday, is wrapping templates in methods and using standard parameters, or one Hash parameter, to expose data to a template.

I’ll explore those in future posts.

—Tuesday 23rd March 2021.