The ability to copy snippets of HTML from web, or old code when refactoring, or from Clojure/Hiccup to another language & framework, or changes from developer tool, or familiarity for new engineers, or not having to care about what flavor of HTML is hip today is a huge productivity boost for me.
I would love to see push for template strings [1] in Clojure, it should be trivial with macros. It would only take some time for IDEs to catch up. They're good. So good they've even influenced Python 3 to add them.
(defui my-component [x]
"<h2 class=(when (selected? x) ["selected"])>Hello</h2>")
(defui my-component [x]
<h2 class=(when (selected? x) ["selected"])>Hello</h2>)
(defn my-component [x]
[:h2 {:class (when (selected? x) ["selected"])} "Hello"])It helps that Clojure's syntax is based on s-expressions, and s-expressions are already isomorphic to HTML/XML.
So in a way, you're still mixing your templates and your code, but you happen to be using the same syntax for both. Which is arguably an improvement.
The equivalent would be something like
function() selected { return true }
["h2", {class: function() {if (selected()) {return "selected"}}}, "Hello"]
Here's a function that always returns true - but it could do any kind of data access. It is just plain Clojure.
Here is a datastructure that represents html: Calling the function hiccup.core/html on that datastructure yeilds an html string like this: So that's great for _strings_ right? But there is an awesome library for ClojureScript called Reagent. And it uses those simple datastructures to generate react components!! I put some more examples at: http://hiccup.space