HTML Extended

There is an emerging trend to extend HTML. To the untrained eye the changes are not obvious.

For example, AngularJS extends the HTML with directives:

<my-directive my-data=”user”></my-directive>

To the browser this snippet of HTML is meaningless. Fortunately AngularJS has an internal compiler that converts it to meaningful HTML.

EmberJs is following suit with their upcoming 1.11 release. Web components will now appear as inline HTML. Like AngularJS, EmberJs will convert it to meaningful HTML.

After EmberJs release 1.11 markup:

<my-video src=></my-video>

Starting with ASP.NET 5, ASP.NET will have “TagHelpers.” In the past to render HTML with Razor you’d do something like this:

@Html.ActionLink("Default", "Index", "Home")

Now with TagHelpers:

<a controller="Default" action="Index">Home</a>

This is an interesting trend. These technologies are extending HTML. At the end of the day it all must be rendered into meaningful HTML for the browser. I wonder if this is the end of custom view engines, such as Haml, Razor, Jade and EJS. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.