Hacker News Reader

Comment by _boffin_ | Hacker News Reader

It looks like everything is moving to a lisp-like structure. brackets... brackets everywhere.

Declarative syntax to express {HT|X|...}ML/DOM-like structures in your source code are a big win if that's a significant percentage of the boilerplate code you have to write.

E.g.:

Literal HTML

``` <div class="active">Hello!</div> ```

Procedural JS

``` let elt = document.createElement('div'); elt.setAttribute("class", "active"); elt.innerText = "Hello!"; ```

Rust literals + HTML macro

``` html! { div(class: "active") { "Hello!" } } ```

Modern Lisp (Clojure, Fennel, et. al.)

``` [:div {:class "active"} "Hello!"] ```

Dunno about you, but when I'm comparing my template source code to the materialized DOM in my browser dev tools, the latter is a _lot_ simpler for me to reason about.

Just so you know in case you don't, if you remove the ```backticks``` and just indent the line by 4 spaces it will be presented in a monospace font, like...

    <div class="active">Hello!</div>

Ah, you can also get italics using asterisks instead of _underscores_.

How do you get a literal asterisk?

Either

\*

**

Testing, *, *

Edit: it works

The documentation is https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc, found via the FAQ link at the bottom of the page.

You only need two spaces, not four.

Ah, yes. You're right, it's 2 :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com