html

Philosophy

HTML is easy to get started with, but hard to get right. There are several hundred element kinds, element attributes, and deeply nested hierachies - with some relationships even being conditional on each other. Remembering all of this is difficult and error-prone, but luckily we don't have to remember any of this by using the type system! Rust's type system enables us to model the entire HTML spec, allowing us to catch all errors ahead of time during compilation.

This project comes in layers. The bottom-most layer is the HTML spec itself. We download it, and parse it into definition files. We then take these definitions, and use it to generate the html-sys crate. This crate is semantically correct, and knows how to render itself to string representations. We then combine html-sys with web-sys (wip) to create a higher-level HTML interface, complete with support for events. This can be used to manipulate HTML both in browser (wip) and non-browser contexts.

Examples

We can create HTML structures one-by-one:

#![recursion_limit = "512"]

use html::text_content::OrderedList;
let tree = OrderedList::builder()
    .list_item(|li| li.text("nori").class("cat"))
    .list_item(|li| li.text("chashu").class("cat"))
    .build();
let string = tree.to_string();

But we can also use Rust's native control flow structures such as loops to iterate over items and create HTML:

#![recursion_limit = "512"]

use html::text_content::OrderedList;
let mut ol = OrderedList::builder();
for name in ["hello", "world"] {
    ol.list_item(|li| li.text(name));
}
let tree = ol.build();

We can also create elements separately and append them later:

#![recursion_limit = "512"]

use html::text_content::{OrderedList, ListItem};
let mut ol = OrderedList::builder();
let li = ListItem::builder().text("hello").build();
ol.push(li);
let tree = ol.build();

Building the project

To fetch, scrape, parse, and generate code; clone the project and then run:

$ cargo xtask all

This will run all stages of the html-bindgen crate, and create a fresh copy of all generated code. If you make a change to any of the codegen stages, please re-run xtask to update the generated code.

References

• Using HTML as a Compile Target (2023)
• web-sys

Installation

$ cargo add html

Safety

This crate uses #![deny(unsafe_code)] to ensure everything is implemented in 100% Safe Rust.

Contributing

Want to join us? Check out our "Contributing" guide and take a look at some of these issues:

• Issues labeled "good first issue"
• Issues labeled "help wanted"

License