Category: twiki

While working on round-trip html5 <-> Rdfa-lite query and editing, I’ve been struck by the primitive feeling of html template languages. {{mustache}} ,  <%escapes%> <–%ssi escapes %–> all work the same way as C preprocessor macros – string concatenation style – which ignores the underlying structure that we’re working with.

Thankfully, HTML5 is changing everything – it has / will have a template tag

Along the way to finding that, I came across Weld.js (dead?), Transparency or Plates and Pure and not forgetting Knockout.js.

None of them quite goes where I want – as they either use class/id, or their own data- attributes.

What I’m after, is leveraging the already existing semantic annotations of existing (or template tag) elements to add new ones.

For example, I might have the following Link menu, and then want to dynamically add others from a remote query

     <ul id="page-list">
         <template id="page-item-template" style="display:none;">
            <li  typeof="WebPage" resource="/">
                <a property="url" href="/" tabindex="-1" id="index">
                    <span property="name">Home</span></a>
             </li>
          </template>
             <li typeof="WebPage" resource="/">
                  <a property="url" href="/" tabindex="-1" id="index">
                    <span property="name">Home</span></a>
             </li>
             <li  typeof="WebPage" resource="/SvenDowideit.html">
                  <a property="url" href="/SvenDowideit.html" tabindex="-1" id="SvenDowideit">
                    <span property="name">Sven Dowideit</span></a>
             </li>
        </ul>

The following works for browsers that don’t support the new HTML5 template tag:

var node = document.querySelector('#page-list [typeof=WebPage]').cloneNode(true);
node.querySelector('[property=name]').textContent = 'TODO';
node.querySelector('[property=url]').href = '/TODO.html';
document.querySelector('#page-list').appendChild(node);

A nice start, but to me, there’s still something not right with the addressing scheme –
which is where some of the above template engines use the @ symbol to denote that the value should be set on the named attribute.

something like this might work

var node = document.querySelector('#page-list [typeof=WebPage]').cloneNode(true);
node.render( {
    '[property=name]@textContent':  'TODO',
    '[property=url]@href': '/TODO.html'
});
document.querySelector('#page-list').appendChild(node);

but setting up the relationships beforehand, and making the clone implicit

var template = getTemplate('#page-list [typeof=WebPage]', {
   name: '[property=name]@textContent',
   url:  '[property=url]@href'
});
document.appendChild(template([
 {name: 'Sven Dowideit', url: '/SvenDowideit.html'},
 {name: 'TODO', url: '/TODO.html'}
]);

Which looks an awful lot like Weld.js’ (and the inverse of Pure?) API. And, should be trivial to implement using Transparancy.

in the process of thinking it through, I wrote a simplistic version that deserves replacing when I’m thinking about something else:

        getTemplate: function(templateSelector, map) {
            if (this.Template === undefined) {
                var template = document.querySelector(templateSelector);
                var template_map = {};

                for (var key in map) {
                    var address = map[key].match(/^([^@]*)@?(.*)?$/);
                    template_map[key] = {
                        node: address[1] || '*',
                        attr: address[2] || 'textContent'
                    }
                }                
                this.Template = function(values) {
                    var new_elements = [];
                    for (var idx in values) {
                        var elem = template.cloneNode(true)                
                        for (var key in values[idx]) {
                            if (template_map[key] !== undefined) {
                                var node =  elem.querySelector(template_map[key].node);
                                //TODO: detect if key is a method, and call it?
                                if (template_map[key].attr === 'textContent') {
                                    node.textContent = values[idx][key];
                                } else {
                                    node.setAttribute(template_map[key].attr, values[idx][key]);
                                }
                            }
                        }
                        //TODO: if it where a real template tag, apparently there would be an elem.content
                        new_elements.push(elem.children[0]);
                    }
                    return new_elements;
                };
            }
            return this.Template;
        }}