> Two years ago, I picked up Zig, and I’d never have imagined I’d be considering web development in such a low-level language.
This is kind of funny remark, given that the author started in 2000 in Web development, and with PHP 3.0.
I started in 1997, our distributed systems class had exercises to write CGIs in Perl and C.
Between 1999 and 2001, most Web development at my employer was in Tcl and C, ASP was naturally a mix of VB and C++ COM components, and there was also the fun to write all those mod_something Apache extensions, and IIS ISAPI modules, naturally in C and C++.
Ah, Microsoft was also shipping ATLServer, because who wouldn't want to use ATL for Web development, while Borland/Inprise was shipping similar stuff for Delphi and C++ Builder.
PHP itself, in 3.0, it was still the time that it hardly had much functionality builtin, so it was quite common to write extension modules in C.
So it is kind of ironic to read coming back to the way things were, before the slow scripting languages takevover in the 2010's, is something no one thought about.
For me web was always about these scripting languages. Even in the CGI days, I learned to use Perl just enough to do a simple web form. I kind of associated the domain with GC languages, as this kind of work usually involves many temporary strings and dictionaries. In fact, the first compiled language I ever used for a web project was Go, and even that was due to the fact that it has garbage collector.
SGML (ISO 8879), the markup meta-language on which HTML is based, has that, as well as many other things, such as type-checked templating.
Hence HTML as a mere vocabulary making use of SGML's facilities didn't need to define its own ad-hoc mechanism.
Btw the <?php ...> construct is also derived from SGML. In SGML terms it's a "processing instruction" rather than an "entity reference", the latter being the basic means for content inclusion.
I've never quite got the deal with 'template engines'. I have always just done normal programming - in whatever language I'm using - and interspersed outputting raw string literals to create the html.
and this leads to html injection attacks when there are small errors in your escaping.
Using a template engine means you systematically ensure that values are escaped (at least, that's one of the reasons i would choose an engine over raw dogging the html).
I love the idea! I could imagine something similar created for other languages too. Perhaps written in a way that a template could be reused in, let's say Django, and a JS React frontend. With all the type-safety that tsx provides.
There was a brief period where everyone and their dog implemented mustache[0] as a template system, but it died quickly because cross-language templating is not that useful in the end, you seldom need to switch host language but keep the templates.
As for Django... well.. Django only has text formatting, you can write any garbage and broken html and lots of invalid templates with silent failures there unfortunately.
If you can suppress your gag reflex, M4 can do some of what you want.
sinclude(...) will include a file and be silent in case of failure.
I did something like this for user-login history because I couldn't use
PHP or Perl:
I'm not a fan of Rust, the overly flexible macros are actually one reason for it, but if you can indeed get LSP support in a custom syntax like this, that's really awesome. Thank you for the example.
This is kind of funny remark, given that the author started in 2000 in Web development, and with PHP 3.0.
I started in 1997, our distributed systems class had exercises to write CGIs in Perl and C.
Between 1999 and 2001, most Web development at my employer was in Tcl and C, ASP was naturally a mix of VB and C++ COM components, and there was also the fun to write all those mod_something Apache extensions, and IIS ISAPI modules, naturally in C and C++.
Ah, Microsoft was also shipping ATLServer, because who wouldn't want to use ATL for Web development, while Borland/Inprise was shipping similar stuff for Delphi and C++ Builder.
PHP itself, in 3.0, it was still the time that it hardly had much functionality builtin, so it was quite common to write extension modules in C.
So it is kind of ironic to read coming back to the way things were, before the slow scripting languages takevover in the 2010's, is something no one thought about.
Hence HTML as a mere vocabulary making use of SGML's facilities didn't need to define its own ad-hoc mechanism.
Btw the <?php ...> construct is also derived from SGML. In SGML terms it's a "processing instruction" rather than an "entity reference", the latter being the basic means for content inclusion.
https://web.dev/articles/imports
Been there, tried that.
Introduced in 2014 (Chrome 36) Deprecated 2018 (Chrome 70) Retired 2019 (Chrome 73)
Why is there no direct support for templating in HTML itself?
(but yes- I used these a lot like 25 years ago)
Using a template engine means you systematically ensure that values are escaped (at least, that's one of the reasons i would choose an engine over raw dogging the html).
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustache_(template_system)
For examples, see http://www.impredicative.com/ur/demo/
https://kotlinlang.org/docs/type-safe-builders.html
As for Django... well.. Django only has text formatting, you can write any garbage and broken html and lots of invalid templates with silent failures there unfortunately.
That's not HTML though, you have to learn a whole new dsl that must conform to rust parser rules. So, not the same thing at all.
eg
this is rsx, but there are other macros that look just like html. i prefer this though, it's much more compact and readable imo