machty / htmlbars

A variant of Handlebars that emits DOM and allows you to write helpers that manipulate live DOM nodes (very much still a WIP, and focused on the data binding use-case)

Status

HTMLBars is a layer built on top of the Handlebars template compiler.

Goals

The goal of HTMLBars is to have a compiler for Handlebars that builds a DOM rather than a String.

This means that helpers can have special behavior based on their context (they know if they are inside an <a> tag, inside an attribute, etc.)

Ultimately, the goal is to have a good data binding setup for Handlebars that can work directly against DOM nodes and doesn't need special tags in the String for the data binding code can find (a major limitation in Ember).

There are also many performance gains in HTMLBars' approach to building DOM vs the HTML-unaware string building approach of Handlebars.

Usage

TODO: much change. This section will be updated shortly.

Until then, check out ARCHITECTURE.md for info on how HTMLBars is structured and its approach to efficiently building / emitting DOM.