I did a quick tweak of React's JSX transpiler to output mithril-compatible code [1], as the above was the sort of syntax I was using JSX to get away from!

    return <html>
      <body>
        <input>
        <button>Add</button>
        <table>
          <tbody>
            <tr>
              <td><input type="checkbox"/></td>
              <td>task description</td>
            </tr>
          </tbody>
        </table>
      </body>
    </html>

[1] https://github.com/insin/msx/

Definitely more readable than Mithril

I think it starts to look like HAML / Slim / Jade once you use CoffeeScript. Understandably not for everyone, but I quite like it, and it doesn't mess with your syntax highlighting like JSX does.

  m "body",
    m "input"
    m "button", "Add"
    m "table",
      m "tr",
        m "td",
          m "input[type=checkbox]"
        m "td", "task description"

Agreed, it's not the best. Maybe you can help come up with something more palatable?

yes man, this abstraction is horror, I hope mithril adheres to something else for declarative tasks a the one above