Taggart

Taggart is a generation library for tag-based markup (HTML, XML, SGML, etc.). It is useful for times when you just want code and functions, not templates. We already have great composition and abstraction tools in Elixir. Why not use them? With this approach, template coposition through smaller component functions should be easy.

Installation

The package can be installed by adding taggart to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:taggart, "~> 0.1.0"}
  ]
end

Usage

Taggart produce Phoenix-compatible "safe" html through underlying usage of the Phoenix.HTML.content_tag/2. Since it just produces IO Lists, it should remain compatible with any other library that uses the same format.

Syntaxes

Taggart supports a number of different syntaxes:

use Taggart

div("Name")

div("Name", class: "bold")

div(class: "bold", do: "Name")

div do
end

div(class: "bold", do: "Name")

div(class: "bold") do
  "Name"
end

Nesting

You can nest and combine in expected ways:

use Taggart

name = "Susan"
age = 27

html do
  body do
    div do
      h2 "Buyer"
      p name, class: "name"
      p age, class: "age"
    end
    div do
      "Welcome"
    end
  end
end

Embedding in Phoenix Forms

You can embed Taggart inside Phoenix helpers using Taggart.taggart/1 to create IO List without creating a top-level wrapping tag.

use Taggart

form = form_for(conn, "/users", [as: :user], fn f ->
  taggart do
    label do
      "Name:"
    end
    label do
      "Age:"
    end
    submit("Submit")
  end
end)

Using Phoenix Helpers

use Taggart

html do
  body do
    div do
      h3 "Person"
      p name, class: "name"
      p 2 * 19, class: "age"
      form_for(build_conn(), "/users", [as: :user], fn f ->
        taggart do
          label do
            "Name:"
            text_input(f, :name)
          end
          label do
            "Age:"
            select(f, :age, 18..100)
          end
          submit("Submit")
        end
      end)
    end
  end
end

Design

The design had two basic requirements:

1. Simple Elixir-based generation of tag-based markup.
2. Interoperate properly with Phoenix helpers.

I looked at and tried a few similar libraries (Eml, Marker), but either wasn't able to get them to work with Phoenix helpers or had problems with their approach (usage of @tag syntax in templates where it didn't refer to a module attribute). My goal was to keep things simple.

License

Taggart is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0.