rapricot verb: When someone shoves an apricot in another person's mouth without their consent.
I have an apricot for you. Templating is terrible. We manipulate structured documents as strings. Strings have no structure. Partials, layouts, form helpers, concatenation of output with a block's binding... all ludicrous bullshit features. And you still have to know html. This isn't abstraction.
We can do much better. We should representing our markup as structured data. It makes all the bullshit features dissapear. Layouts? It's just a function that wraps up some data. Partials are just functions that we call to insert some data into our data. Helpers will finally be natural to write, not a context switch to an uncomfortable form of the same thing. And finally people will read your view code and understand what the hell is going on.
Your editor will even have highlighting support.
Rapricot.render(
[:html,
[:head,
[:title, "Small animals"]],
[:body,
[:p, {class: "cute"},
[:strong, "Kittens"], " and ", [:strong, "Ducks"]]]])Will return:
<html>
<head>
<title>
Small animals
</title>
</head>
<body>
<p class="cute">
<strong>
Kittens
</strong>
and
<strong>
Ducks
</strong>
</p>
</body>
</html># Form Helper
def text_field(name, value)
[:input, {type: "text", name: name, value: value}]
end
# Partial
def user_partial(user)
[:div, {class: "user"},
[:span, {class: "name"}, user.name],
[:br],
[:ul, {class: "friends"}, user.friends.map do |friend|
[:li, {class: "friend"}, friend.name]
end]]
end
# Layout
def default_layout(title, *page)
[:html,
[:head,
[:title, title]],
[:body,
[:div, {id: "container"}, page]]]
end
# Complete view
def search_box(search_query)
[:div, {class: "search"}, text_field("search_query", search_query)]
end
def user_page(user, search_query)
default_layout("#{user.name}'s page",
search_box(search_query),
user_partial(user)).rapricot
end
# Model
class User
attr_accessor :name, :friends
def initialize(name, friends)
@name = name
@friends = friends
end
end