HtmlData

Yet another pure data representation of elm/html. (Perhaps some types need not be opaque after all)

Before

import Html exposing (..)

pagetitle : Int-> Html msg
pagetitle num =
    if modBy 2 num == 0 then
        h2 [] [ text "Get even" ]

    else
        h1 [] [ text "That's odd" ]

But the return value is opaque; we cannot inspect it nor do anything with it other than return it to elm runtime for rendering on a browser.

After

import HtmlData exposing (..)

pagetitle : Int-> Html msg
pagetitle num =
    if modBy 2 num == 0 then
        h2 [] [ text "Get even" ]

    else
        h1 [] [ text "That's odd" ]

Changing only the import, we can pattern match and inspect the return value.

case pagetitle 4 of
    Element "h1" _ _ ->
        "Odd? Wrong"

    Element "h2" _ _ ->
        "Even! Correct"

    _ ->
        "Not even close"

We can write functions that convert it into html String

pagetitle 4
    |> HtmlData.Extra.toTextHtml HtmlData.Extra.defaultSanitizeConfig renderedNode
--> "<h2>Get&#32;even</h2>"

Or plain text String

pagetitle 4
    |> HtmlData.Extra.toTextPlain HtmlData.Extra.defaultTextPlainConfig
--> "Get even"

Useful Functions

But note that there's only type definitions in this package; the dependencies of this package is minimum.

Actual helper functions like toTextPlain can be found in HtmlData.Extra instead.

Demo

See https://html-data.netlify.app for a demo of how we can use these data types. Its source code can be found in github.com/choonkeat/explore-html-data-extra

Out of scope

• Parsing html https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/hecrj/html-parser/latest/
• Turn an Elm app into a static HTML site https://github.com/eeue56/elm-static-html https://github.com/ThinkAlexandria/elm-static-html