[Pitch] Community-maintained HTML and CSS Swift types

[RandomHashTags (Evan Anderson)]

I tried implementing swift-html-types into HTMLKit with minor success. There is some key data and logic missing before it can be used. Some improvements I've thought of terms of generics, logic, memory footprint, and functionality:

(there are probably more)

list

• removing the lowercase typealias (other libraries can do this if they wish)
• adding support for dynamic values (currently cannot; literals are required)
• support for optional values in more areas
• better naming of protocols/types by prefixing some with HTML
• use camelCase for variable names (not html styled; other libraries can do this if they wish)
• an easy way to check if the element is a void element (something like @inlinable public static var isVoid: Bool { true })
• having an attribute value type per Attribute
• adding some missing attributes (ARIA, Command, CommandFor, etc)
  • Form is missing a acceptCharset in the initializer
• rearranging stored values for minimal byte usage (obviously can't with some elements)
• packing data when applicable (like the Button element)
• replacing the following patterns with @inlinable public static var _: Self/String { "xyz" }
  • public static let _: Self = "xyz"
  • public static let _: String = "xyz"

@Helge_Hess1

To give some examples, let's look at just the Anchor tag structure.

1. The first thing I noticed is that it is really big. Just an empty one takes 144 bytes w/o any actual content! The string <a/> just takes 4 bytes (16 if done as a String), even <a href="#"> would probably fit into a tagged pointer. (don't get me wrong, that may be a fine choice for a specific framework, but it wouldn't work for arbitrary ones)

I agree, wasted bytes is sub-optimal. Compile-time rendering is the only solution to avoid this without sacrificing convenience or functionality. How big of a problem is it really? What HTML libraries have you used that are better? ^{benchmark comparing different library's throughput/rendering performance}

@Helge_Hess1

Also it doesn't actually seem to cover element containment rules? Modeling such in a tree would also often requirement an in-memory transformation of the resource vs proper streaming.

That is a great feature suggestion!