Stencil
Asynchronous HTML5 templating for Node.js and the browser. Photo by mufflevski.
Thoughts on Stencil? Join the
Discussion.
Synopsis
Layouts.
<s:include xmlns:s="stencil">
<s:tag name="document">
<html>
<head>
<title><s:value select="attr.title"/></title>
<s:block name="head"/>
</head>
<body>
<h1><s:value select="attr.title"/></h1>
<s:block name="body"/>
</body>
</html>
</s:tag>
</s:include>
Pages laid out.
<o:document xmlns:s="stencil" xmlns:o="inc:layout.stencil" title="Hello, World!">
<o:head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/></o:head>
<o:body><p>Hello, World!</p></o:body>
</o:document>
The same templates run on the browser and in Node.js, so you can use the same
logic you use to serve a generate page to refresh that page.
Stencil on the Server
On the server, we create a template and serialize it to HTML5. You can also
serialize to older HTML flavors for older browsers.
Stencil on the Browser
On the browser, when we generate Stencil XML, we simply import it into the
existing DOM using Document.adoptNode
.
Remember
- It's not a query tool. It's a templating tool.
Expand
- Functions must have no side-effects; i.e. do not use your template functions
to create a hit counter.
- It's not hard to write template functions that do not have side effects. The
sort of functions that might have side effects are not likely to appear in
the logic that supports emitting markup.
Motivations
Revisiting the ideas explored in a Java based
Stencil.
Stencil is asynchronous HTML5 templating for Node.js and the browser. It based
on some ideas from yesteryear and some ideas from tomorrow.
This project evolved from work with Streamline and CoffeeScript. That work has
been moved to a project named Pastiche.
Philosophy
Especially when dealing with a library that has a goal of being small, you're
limited as to how much scaffolding you can offer developers. My approach for
Stencil is to define three roles, application developer, web developer, and web
designer, and say the first two roles labor to create a childlike sense of
wonder in the latter role.
An application developer creates APIs that the web developer can query. The web
developer wraps those APIs in tag libraries, so that the web designer can focus
on semantic layout.
Change log
Changes for each release.
Version 0.0.5
Mon Apr 22 19:07:43 UTC 2013
- Fix non-directive with attribute child directives. #108.
Version 0.0.4
Tue Apr 16 14:15:19 UTC 2013
- Add
request
and response
to Stencil service. #106.