Comment by radicalethics
6 hours ago
What happens if I simply add an iterator mechanism to HTML (well, I guess we need variables too)? Is it no longer a markup language here (I won't add anything else):
<for i=0; i<1; i++> <html> </html> </for>
Better question, why don't we upgrade XML to do that?
> Better question, why don't we upgrade XML to do that?
XSLT which is an application of XML allows you to do a for-each: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/XML/XSLT/Refere...
That's not technically HTML anymore.
But if you disagree with this, or somehow work around this statement by replacing your for element with some "for-loop" custom element (it is valid HTML to add custom tags with dashes in their names), my stronger argument is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46743219#46743554
That's basically the design of PHP with different syntax. <?for($i=0;$i<1;$i++){?> <html></html> <?}?>
Nobody uses PHP this way any more though — people treat it like Python or Node and write the entire codebase inside a big <? block
JSP is similar with different syntax again — nobody uses JSP either
I think ASP too but I never used that
You could have some client side JavaScript handle your for nodes as well. That's how I imagined what OP described actually.
> Nobody uses PHP this way any more though
Well… I have bad news.
I do, for one :-)
I ask you then: (1) how do you deal with the template that surrounds a large number of pages on a site? (2) how do you deal with the fact that the average web form might want to display something different based on the form contents (e.g. redraw the form if there's an error, draw something different on success?) (3) do you write anything that returns JSON or other results for AJAX or web services?
3 replies →
If HTML was never able to be the full solution, then I guess if I had to expand on where I'm going, then what the heck are we even doing with this html thing? Either MAKE IT like PHP, ditch it, or do something, anything.
HTML is perfectly able to do what it was designed for: mark up documents.
There still needs to be something like HTML even when you have PHP: PHP is something you run on the server and it still needs to output something to the client in some format, and HTML is adequate for this.
The heck we are doing with HTML is taking it for building client apps. But even then, you now have UI toolkits that mimic this model: QML, whatever XML format Android has to design UIs, etc.