HtmlBuilder

A small HTML library that uses its own Domain Specific Language (DSL) for easily creating HTML tags. It is also extensible thanks to Elixirs ability to generate functions from external data (in this case the tags.txt) Besides HTML tag generation, the library also supports HTML attributes.

How does the library work?

It reads all available tags from the tags.txt file and walks the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) during compile-time, converting AST nodes like

{:div, [], [[do: {:p, [], [[do: {:text, [], ["Han shot first!"]}]]}]]}

into macro calls such as

tag(:div, []) do
  tag(:p, []) do
    put_buffer(var!(buffer, Html), to_string("Han shot first!"))  
  end
end

Installlation

This library is not available in Hex since I'm not planning to maintain it. However, if you want to use it, you can instead add this repository as your dependecy to your Elixir project:

def deps do
  [{:html_builder, git: "git://github.com/dczombera/html_builder.git"}]
end

Usage

The HtmlBuilder has to be imported into your module to take advantage of the DSL. Then, simply start a new block with markup do and use the the names of the HTML tags you need. In order to use HTML attributes, you just have to pass a key value pair representing the attribute to the HTML tag macro.

For example, the HtmlTemplate module importing the HtmlBuilder would generate following HTML string in iex:

  defmodule HtmlTemplate do
    import HtmlBuilder

    def render do
      markup do
        div class: "front" do
          h1 id: "header" do
            p class: "paragraph", id: "bad_ass" do
              text "Say my name!"
            end
          end
        end
        div class: "answer" do
          text "Heisenberg."
        end
      end
    end
  end

iex> HtmlTemplate.render
"<div class=\"front\">\n<h1 id=\"header\">\n<p class=\"paragraph\" id=\"bad_ass\">\nSay my name!\n</p>\n  </h1>\n</div><div class=\"back\">\nHeisenberg.\n</div>"

License

MIT