A DSL for generating HTML with JS

Maybe some people find this interesting. I created a little DSL to generate HTML with JavaScript. Here is an example:

var things = [{text: "Hello"}, {text: "World"}];

with(HTML) {

var html = div({
 id: "foo",
 content: a({
   href: "#",
   content: ["test", span("bar")]
 })
}) +

div({
 className: "baz",
 content: map(things, function (thing) {
   return p(thing.text)
 })
});

alert(html)

document.write(html)
}

Yes, I know, with is very evil but it is cool in this situation.

Here is the full source. I hacked it up in 30 minutes and it is in bad need for a cleanup, but otherwise it seems to work alright.

var HTML = (function () {
   function encode(text) {
       text = text.replace(/&/g, "&", "g");
       text = text.replace(/</g, "&lt;", "g");
       text = text.replace(/>/g, "&gt;", "g");
       text = text.replace(/"/g, "&quot;", "g");
       text = text.replace(/'/g, "&apos;", "g");
       return text;
   }
  
   function renderAttr(attr) {
       if(!attr) return '';
       var html = '';
       for(var name in attr) {
           var value = attr[name];
           if(name === "className") name == "class";
           if(name === "content") continue;
           html += ' '+name+'="'+encode(value)+'"'
       }
       html.encoded = true;
       return html
   }
  
   function makeTag (name) {
       return function (paras, content) {
           if(arguments.length < 2) {
               content = [];
           }
           if(typeof content === "string") content = [content]
           var attr    = {};
           if(typeof paras === "string") {
               content = [encode(paras)];
           } else if(paras == null) {
               content = [];
           } else if(paras.content) {
               var c = paras.content;
               delete paras.content;
               return arguments.callee(paras, c);
           } else if(paras.length > 0) {
               content = paras;
           } else {
               attr = paras;
           }
           var empty = content.length === 0 ? true : false;
          
           var html = '<'+name+renderAttr(attr)+(empty ? '/' : '')+'>';
           if(!empty) {
               html += content.join("");
              
               html += '';
           }
           return html;
       }
   }
  
   function map(enumerable, fn) {
       var result = [];
       for(var i = 0, len = enumerable.length; i < len; ++i) {
           result.push(fn(enumerable[i]))
       }
       return result;
   }
  
   var tags = ["div", "a", "p", "span"]
  
   var HTML = {
       map: map,
       encode: encode
   };
  
   map(tags, function (name) {
       HTML[name] = makeTag(name)
   });
  
   return HTML;
})();

Joose IRC Channel

We'd like to announce that Joose now has a dedicated IRC channel on irc.freenode.org:

#joose

I'm currently working on a large online store project that is using a platform based on server side JavaScript. We use Joose on both the server side and the client side. Very good stuff. More on that later.