remixml

Remixml

Remixml is an XML/HTML macro language/template engine.

The language and primitives used blend in completely with standard XML/HTML syntax and therefore integrate smoothly with existing XML/HTML syntax colouring editors.

Requirements

It runs inside any webbrowser environment (starting at IE11 and up).

The engine uses browser primitives to accellerate parsing; most notably it uses documentFragments and will therefore have trouble running in a plain NodeJS environment.

Basic usage

In essence Remixml is a macro language that has HTML/XML-like syntax and uses special entities to fill in templates. The entities that are recognised by Remixml are always of the form: &scope.varname; I.e. they distinguish themselves from regular HTML entities by always having at least one dot in the entity name.

The following sample code will illustrate the point:

Remixml.parse('<h1>Title of &_.sitename; for &_.description;</h1>'
  + '<p at="&anything.whatever;"> Some global variables &var.some; '
  + 'or &var.globalvars; or'
  + ' &var.arrays.1; or &var.arrays.2; or &var.objects.foo; or '
  + '&anything.really;',
 {_: {
    sitename: "foo.bar",
    description: "faster than lightning templates"
  },
  var: {
    some: "other",
    globalvars: 7,
    arrays: ["abc", 14, "def"],
    objects: {"foo":"bar", "indeed":"yes"}
  },
  anything: {
    really: "other",
    whatever: 7
  }
 });

Reference documentation

Full entity syntax

&   scope   .   variablename   :   encoding   %   formatting   ;

• scope
  References the primary level in the variables object (the second argument to parse()).
• variablename
  References second and deeper levels in the variables object (can contain multiple dots to designate deeper levels, is used to access both objects and arrays).
• encoding (optional)
  Specifies the encoding to be used when substituting the variable. The encodings available are:
  • html
    Default, encodes using HTML entities.
  • uric
    URI component, encodes URI arguments in an URL.
  • json
    Encodes as a JSON string.
  • none
    No encoding, as is, can be abbreviated as ":;".
• formatting (optional)
  printf()-like formatting specification .
  Supported formats: %c, %d, %e, %f, %g, %s, %x.
  If the formatting string equals a three-letter currency (all capitals), the value will be formatted like a currency (including currency symbol) in the current locale.

Note: the entity reference must not contain spaces (the spaces shown above are there to clarify the format, they cannot be used in a real entity reference).

Language statements

Simple assigment:

<set var="_.variablename">the new value</set>

Simple calculations:

<set var="_.variablename" expr="_.variablename + 1"></set>

Conditionals:

<if expr="_.variablename > 1">
 yes
</if>
<elif expr="_.variablename == 'foobar'">
 second condition valid
</elif>
<else>
 otherwise
</else>

Counted loop:

<for from="1" to="42">
 This is line &_._recno;<br />
</for>

Iterating through an object or array:

<for in="&_.variablename;">
 This is line &_._recno;<br />
</for>

API

Reserved object variables

• $.sys.lang
  If set, it overrides the default locale of the browser environment (currently only used during currency formatting).

References

Soon to be launched:

• The Remixml website.
• For historical reference:
  Remixml was originally inspired by RXML, the Roxen webserver macro language.