Skip to main content

Dead To Me! DomNomNom

DomNomNom was a toy templating tool for front-end web applications I built during a long ride in the passenger seat. The idea was to build a templating system that required minimal, and in many cases, no template at all. I wanted to see if it was possible to map data directly into markup structures based purely on semantics.


For example, instead of some mark up that rendered a title into the page like {{ title }} we might just map the <h1> tag to the title in the data binding.


$(“body”).domnomnom({
“h1”: “This is the title”,
})


And it was really easy to get this basic setup in place quickly. I began to take it further. I allowed mapping lists of data, which would clone an element instead of simply inserting the text contents into it. Suddenly I could render tables and lists with ease.


“ul”: {
“li”: [“one”, “two”, “three”]
}


And the markup’s original <li> would function as a template to clone for this content. It was very clean to write templates for, because they were just mark-up with dummy data and content in them. This meant a designer could build the templates with whatever tools they wanted and the data could just get pumped into it.


DomNomNom in its final state supports mapping syntax that can handle attributes and properties, so you can map into form fields and the like. There are also controls capable of changing the order cloned elements are inserted and allowing the clone templates to be controlled better. If I removed the empty lines for formatting, the whole thing would come in under 100 lines of Javascript.


I built this on jQuery, but if I re-did this based on modern browsers with querySelector it probably wouldn’t grow by more than a dozen lines, and would be a lot faster.

Check it out, if just to see.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operate on

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful

How To Teach Software Development

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools Education is broken. Education about software development is even more broken. It is a sad observation of the industry from my eyes. I come to see good developers from what should be great educations as survivors, more than anything. Do they get a headstart from their education or do they overcome it? This is the first part in a series on software education. I want to open a discussion here. Please comment if you have thoughts. Blog about it, yourself. Write about how you disagree with me. Write more if you don't. We have a troubled industry. We care enough to do something about it. We hark on the bad developers the way people used to point at freak shows, but we only hurt ourselves but not improving the situation. We have to deal with their bad code. We are the twenty percent and we can't talk to the eighty percent, by definition, so we need to impro