Developer Hacks Together Object-Oriented HTML (github.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Ever since I started coding, I have always loved object-oriented design patterns. I built an HTML preprocessor that adds inheritance, polymorphism, and public methods to this venerable language. It offers more freedom than a templating engine and has a wider variety of use cases. Pull requests appreciated!

Comments

Spare us.

[HornWumpus]

Another genius, building his own framework, just what the world needs.

Re:Spare us.

[Dutch Gun]

You know, I disagree vehemently with those who proclaim OO an abject failure. But I'm always a bit bemused with people who feel the need to build OO into everything, whether it needs it or not. The trick, of course, is to use it as it makes sense.

One of the problems with OO is that poorly designed programs can be much worse to grok the logic and flow of than poorly designed procedural programs, mostly because of how scattered the logic can be throughout an object hierarchy.

A much more modern* trend is to avoid deep class hierarchies whenever practical, preferring instead to try to use smaller, more reusable objects that are only responsible for a single task, and use composition of objects. This allows you to more easily test each individual component and assure correctness of behavior, and then build on that behavior. These days, a lot of my classes are very shallow, either a single class, or perhaps derived from an interface class to hide implementation details when necessary.

Class hierarchies still have their place on occasion. There are still cases when you must manage a number of types of related-but-different objects with a lot of common properties. But if you keep this paradigm to a minimum, you'll be a lot happier with OOP, and keep your code more manageable.

* If you consider the last 15 years or so "modern"

Re:Spare us.

[ls671]

Nice post! Most of my utility classes are stateless and contain only static methods. A lot of common logic is in there instead of being in the instantiated class. Inheritance here and there were it makes sense.

Yet, I still see OO heads around who think; the more it inherits, the more it is OO. The ultimate case is those projects where all classes inherit from an often called "RootObject" that contains all utility methods for the project hence effectively making all utility methods global methods.

Re:Spare us.

[Pseudonym]

Yes, but also no.

Look at JavaScript. ECMAScript 2015 finally added something kind of resembling real classes. Why is that?

Because the first job of JS has always been to manipulate DOM which was designed in the "90s class hierarchy bloat" aesthetic. The need, but not the ability, was there from the beginning.

If Eich had managed to get Scheme in, we wouldn't be having this conversation now.

Tha half-arsed Smalltalk/Erlang style OO that node.js developers seem to be embracing is more "real" than this. I do not think that OO is a failure. I think that Alan Kay has beaten Grady Booch but the world hasn't realised it yet.

its classless to post stories about your own stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

It's really, really CLASSLESS to post stories about your own projects. That said, it's a preprocessor, that's all. Not seeing how this is different from say, PHP?

Stale project, new news?

[Anonymous Coward]

This repo hasn't had a commit in 2 years, why is this interesting now?

Re: Stale project, new news?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's just how late Slashdot is. When he submitted it, it was brand new.

html is a markup language

[johanw]

that describes the structure of a document. It is not a graphical design language, as most webdesigners think, or a programming language as most webdevelopers think. It is as much of either as LaTeX.

venerable language

[phantomfive]

I'm suspicious of anyone who calls HTML 'venerable.' They should call it, "notorious" or "infamous," maybe, "expectorant." Marc Andreesen points out there are just problems with it, and I can't see OOP fixing things.

So, I looked at this guy's project, and it's better than I expected. The major problem it solves is: "how do you avoid repeating yourself, while still keeping things flexible?" The common approach right now is to either throw it into a CSS library (like Bootstrap) or write Javascript to produce the HTML. The latter idea there sounds like a joke but it's not.

In comparison, this lets you break things into components (like React does), but without any cost to the front end. Overall a good approach, but likely to get lost in the noise of a thousand other web frameworks.

I don't see any OO

[Half-pint HAL]

The Github page doesn't give any examples that look like OO to me, which is A) not surprising, because what the hell would an OO markup language look like and B) very surprising, given that the whole DOM is OO from the ground up in modern rendering engines.

Anyway, on a tangent...

I see no real call for OO in web rendering, but the one thing I think is missing from HTML is the ability to parameterise things like column widths etc. Why cant I call column 1's width "x" and ask the renderer to make column 2's width "3x"? Or use these parameters across tables, so that the columns in table 1, table 2 and table 3 are all the same size?

I know this can be done with CSS, but in order to do that, I need to choose a particular size -- I can say "I don't care about the actual size, but these 3 things should all be as big as each other."