plan9! Some day I'll try it out. Such a nicely integrated system. As an emacs user, I cracked up at the manpage for Emacs in plan9. Hilarious!

> https://git.2f30.org/shite/files.html

So I looked at the templating code. Have you considered here documents for templating? Being able to declare complete HTML fragments is a big advantage for debugging parts, and keeping overall HTML valid. I author HTML fragments in an HTML-mode buffer and get linting etc. to make sure my markup is OK. Then I can just copy-paste it back into the heredoc.

Another thing I did was to use functions as wrappers for each HTML fragment, so that I could define guarantees in the scope of the HTML (any variable / field that must be present or must be of a certain type).

I haven't really, because the only place where i needed valid html generated mostly by the program is on the navbar , the taglist etc. the main docu is kinda plaintext on a div when rendering html. But i will go back and investigate your idea since it would be elegant and rc supports normal here documents. for example

  ed $3 <<EOF
  g/$1/s//$2/g
  w
  EOF

changes all occurrences of $1 to $2 in file $3. :)

Yeah, I noticed that `ed` invocation in the rc manual. I'm tempted to find use-cases for it. That way I can lay claim to having used the one true editor :)

In general, I like making programs out of declarative constructs and/or literal data, because it's so much easier to do "local reasoning" with those things, as compared to imperative procedures, or heaven forefend, live objects.