After deep-diving on front-end stuff in the late 2000s, I got enamored with the idea of a templating engine that would let you <i>address</i> content into places in the document rather than strain it in via placeholders.<p>Eventually, I wrote a library for it in PHP [0] and built a blog and another app or two around it. Never could seem to sell many people on the basic concept, though. Glad to see someone else had some similar ideas.<p>[0] <a href="http://weston.canncentral.org/web_lab/CAST/about.html" rel="nofollow">http://weston.canncentral.org/web_lab/CAST/about.html</a>
<a href="https://github.com/westonc/CAST/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/westonc/CAST/</a>
I'm glad this isn't on Github because I'd be so tempted to add features to it. I keep getting ideas, none of which would make this framework not a mistake.
Cascading Tree Sheets <a href="https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/87014" rel="nofollow">https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/87014</a> would fit so nicely with this.
People are laughing at this, but it's less dumb than the adjacent project when I was still at a certain BigTech.<p>They were implementing a "3rd party platform" like Geocities where you can describe your webpages in YAML. This templating language lacked the composability and flexibility of HTML or Angular. Nodes in the tree mapped to custom built Angular.JS components. This is all arbitrary. You'd have to know the names of the components, which props to pass in. The implementation itself was built on top of Angular.JS instead of native vanilla JS and DOM manipulation. So basically they maintained a virtual DOM on top of Angular. All of this lived in an IFrame.<p>The competing solution was a sandbox where these 3rd party vendors could describe their UI sections in a limited subset of Angular, running in a security sandbox where data access is done through an API ( as opposed to providing components with tightly coupled and hard-coded data access ).
Does this make Emmet a higher-level scripting language?<p>Thinking about that seriously, I would love an Emmet style tool for quick class outlining. Not that it's a big issue. SomeClass<SomeBaseClass::someFunc(arg1,arg2)::anotherFunc(arg1:type) tab to complete.<p>For anyone not sure what Emmet is <a href="https://www.emmet.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.emmet.io/</a><p>It autocompletes something like `ul.the-class>li*3` into<p><pre><code> <ul class=the-class>
<li></li>
<li></li>
<li></li>
</ul></code></pre>
Since this thread is probably catnip for a certain kind of person...<p>Anyone have a term for "a CSS" that is distinct from the official CSS specs? I.e., a term that communicates something re-uses CSS-the-syntax, but with a different set of properties and functions.<p>For a silly example, imagine there's a CSS with properties and functions for describing tacos.