Just venting here, but having used more templating languages than I care to remember (Jinja2, ERB, FTL, XSLT, JSX, Handlebars, etc), I find Hyperscript utterly horrid to work with. In no particular order, the things it breaks include: Code portability (can’t copy/paste html snippets without running them through a converter) Syntax highlighting (turns everything into a huge blob) eg [01]vs [56] Code completion is FUBAR, let alone time-savers like https://emmet.io I never thought anything would make me pine for the bad old days of PHP, but Hyperscript’s done it! Is it just me?

Yeah I agree that it’s not the best to work with, especially compared to handlebars (which we also use) where you can write HTML as you’d expect. We started using virtual-dom/virtual-hyperscript in places where we needed to improve performance. The topic of our multiple templating systems has been something we started talking about within the team recently; we don’t have any concrete plans yet, but realize it would be a good idea to simplify. Maybe this means we won’t use virtual-hyperscript anymore? Time will tell.

The syntax is a little weird to get used to. I remember being really tripped out by it when I first started writing Discourse themes, but I eventually figured out how it works. It’s also possible to generate raw HTML via widget as well. app/assets/javascripts/discourse/widgets/quick-access-item.js.es6 f0f03acb2 html({ icon, href }) { return h("a", { attributes: { href } }, [ iconNode(icon), new RawHtml({ html: ` ${this._usernameHtml()}${this._contentHtml()} ` }) ]); }, I’m not the most skilled at being able to say when to use what and where, but it’s an option to consider if you’re doing some custom work, need to write a widget, and are having difficulty using virtual-hyperscript.

Interesting… I thought one of the big benefits of Ember was the speed of the GlimmerVM. Is virtual-dom performance that much of an improvement over Glimmer?

I think we started using virual-dom before glimmer was a possibility? @eviltrout would know way better than I would. This also reminded me that using handlebars in widgets using glimmer is possible… as of FEATURE: Use Glimmer compiler for widget templates · discourse/discourse@dffb1fc · GitHub

Discourse is from 2013, we started complaining about Android performance in 2015, added virtual-dom in 2016, and Glimmer was announced in 2017 and it’s being actively integrated into Ember.

I see. That timeline helps – thanks! So, I suppose the easiest course would be to wait until Glimmer performance is equivalent to virtual-dom, then dump it and revert to pure Ember?

That feature is cool, but I’m having some trouble getting it to work. I’ve require’d discourse/widgets/hbs-compiler, but I still get error: hbs is not a function [29] Any idea why? I’m on 2.4.0beta5, and using theme-cli, if that helps.

I tried using templates within widgets but found it was of limited use without apparent support for helpers?: [image] Using a hbs file as the template for widget Development Related: Does this support helpers?, e.g.: Because I can’t get that to work if supplied as part of the template. that was annoying as you couldn’t then re-use existing standard code elsewhere in the code-base.

Yeah, sadly, I think trying to use handlebars instead of hyperscript is currently more trouble than it’s worth.

Is it just me, or is Hyperscript hideous?

Development

edL (Ed Lepedus) October 22, 2019, 3:19pm 6

That’s worth knowing – thanks! I spent an hour or two manually re-writing html fragments, but between this and html2hyperscript, I’ve got a couple of options to play with

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Is it just me, or is Hyperscript hideous?

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