[Haskell-cafe] do like notation works fine when using ghc head

Marc Weber marco-oweber at gmx.de
Fri Sep 12 18:51:34 EDT 2008


> There is also the combinator approach of Text.Html, which
> gives you a syntax similar to (3) but without abusing "do":
> 
> (rootElt ! [xmlns "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml",
>            lang "en-US" >> xml:lang "en-US"]) $ concatXml
>   [head $ title $ text "minimal"
>   ,body $ concatXml
>     [h1 $ text "minimal"
>     ,div $ text $ "args passed to this program: " ++ (show args)
>     ]
>   ]

Keep in mind that my library tries to do real DTD type checking.
This means that 
  body, h1, div
all have different types. So they can't easily be put into a list.
And yes: I care about each character I have to type less :-)
About IO (). IO was just a poor man example to show that you can nest
arbitrary monads. Have a look at the WASH library to see in which
wonderful ways this can be used..

One working snippet from the testXHTML.hs sample file provided by the
lib:

        #include "vxmldos.h"
          tDo $ runHtmlDoc $ vdo
            head $ title $ text "text"
            body $ vdo
              script $ X.type "text/javascript" >> text "document.writeln('hi');"
              h2 $ text "That's a headline, hello and how do you do?"
              -- br e   eg a <br/> is not allowed here
              div $ vdo
                onclick "alert('clicked');"
                styleA "color:#F79"
                text "text within the div"
              div e
              return "That's nice, isn't it?"

vxmldos.h defines a vdo cpp macro which expands to
let .... ; in $ do
where ... rebinds >>=, >>, lift to make this work (in with ghc head)

The library can now cope with fancy dts such as (a*)* etc as well
If you still find bugs let me know.

The more interesting part starts now: figuring out how do build a nice
HTML library on top of this all.

Sincerly
Marc Weber


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