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Introduction to the Document Makeup Library (DML)
The web has evolved a lot since the days of Tim Berners-Lee, but we are still using some of the initial concepts. From a technical view, HTML is superfuous: We can access the HTML-DOM-API directly to build the DOM. From a programmers view, there are good reasons to rethink the whole concept.
The Document Makeup Library (DML) is a new Javascript library that has just been released as Open Source. DML makes it increadibly easy to build complex web applications using just vanilla javascript (one language to rule them all...). It let´s you create DOM elements using the tags you are used to - not in html, but from within Javascript. h1() creates an <h1>-element, p() a <p> and so on. This makes it possible to "bypass" the traditional HTML-approach completely.
What´s the advantage? Much more than you would think:
You will find more useful aspects using the DML-approach. After a few days you will ask yourself how you did it before?
The core of the DML-libary is free (Open Source under the CC0-1.0 License), a complete introduction and reference can be found here. There are some more advanced modules available for professional use (e.g a charting library with an unlimited number of axis on each side of a diagram).
The homepage itself was created using DML too. It provides lot´s of "living" examples that can be changed to immediately see the effects. Please try out yourself!
It is true: DML creates dynamic websites, bypassing the traditional HTML-part (though you can still use HTML). Some search engines will not be able to read the content of your site then (beside Google, that can render and index dynamic pages too). But this is not different from React or Vue, that have a similar approach. DML is still a very young project, so server side rendering is not yet implemented.
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