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mikepurvis • today at 4:29 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

As a nix person, I like this a lot and could see myself using it. My only criticism would be I don't love this kind of thing:

    "<!DOCTYPE html>\n"
    +
      html
        [ (attrs.lang metadata.lang) ]
        [
          (head [ ] [ (partials.head context) ])
          (body
            [
              (attrs.classes [
                "font-sans"
                "bg-white"
              ])
I understand that this is very flexible and powerful, but it immediately makes the templates highly non-portable and requiring of hand-authorship— fine for a personal blog by a code nerd, but a non-starter for when a designer is involved who will want to use visual tools. I see that right below that there's also a "normal string templating" option that's closer to conventional jinja2 or the like, but it's ultimately still pretty nix-ified.

It might be worth some ifd [1] to allow a step that pre-processes conventional html + tags template files into the form that can be consumed by nixtml.

[1]: or the still-experimental dynamic derivations: https://fzakaria.com/2025/03/10/an-early-look-at-nix-dynamic...

Replies

granra • today at 5:10 PM

I'm the author of nixtml. It's already doing IFD by using python to parse markdown content + metadata and superhtml to format the final HTML (a bit unnecessary, but I liked it while developing it).

I really wanted the templates to just be nix functions. It shouldn't be an issue to pass the context to an external program with `pkgs.runCommand` or something and then read the result (IFD like you mentioned).

Edit: I'm glad to hear you like it :)

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