Show HN: HyTags – HTML as a Programming Language

HTML (and XMLish syntax in general) is LISP syntax (not semantics) in disguise. A tag can be viewed as function application, with the attributes as named arguments and the elements as variadic arguments.

The example from the link's main page is equivalent to:

    (button "Say something")
    (on_click
      (selection-insert-after
        (div "Hello, World ")))

Reminds me of ColdFusion. Don't recall having a great time using it, though I was very young at the time so maybe my memory is distorted on this.

This seems similar to _hyperscript, except it uses custom tags instead of the "_" attribute. I'm not sure which approach is better, but personally, I prefer keeping the same document structure and varying behavior through attributes. Easier to rewrite on the fly. Custom tags can be clearer in some cases, but attributes tend to work better with existing HTML and tooling.

I remember when one of the primary criticisms of ColdFusion was programming logic in the form of tags.

Interesting idea. As a product person I'm immediately thinking about security. how does this handle auth, data validation, etc when backend logic is embedded in HTML?

But that said, this could unlock some interesting use cases where security isn't the primary concern. Like few internal tools, prototypes, small side projects where the tradeoff might be worth it.

first let me say i applaud you for experimenting and doing something unconventional

- thoughts as i was reading this -

ok, so we're programming via an AST vs syntax

I think this is interesting, however there's notable downsides - verbosity, dom bloat & debugging

A potential upside to this is very odd but interesting meta programming capabilities, since the code should be able to inspect & modify itself fairly easily by inspecting the dom

I am inclined to distrust the claim that this reduces complexity as most of the actions are mutation heavy directly to the dom, and the stack based programming is something i struggle to practical examples where it is a significant improvement to mainstream strategies

This looks very interesting! It reminds me of the approach taken by HTMX or Alpine.js, but with deeper control flow logic. In your opinion, what is the main advantage of hyTags over HTMX for developers managing complex UI states?

HTML can be so powerful when used as DOM instead of plain string as is sadly used in most html templating engines on the backend, one example of DOM template engine built by myself https://github.com/givanz/vtpl

Neat! Looks like a pretty straightforward way to develop.

I'm a little too enamored with web components to give it more consideration/testing, but it looks like it could be great for blue sky/green field projects.