Have been playing around with `kotlinx-html` (the JVM version) in combination with `htmx`, and likin...

# kotlinx-html

[Peter]

Have been playing around with kotlinx-html (the JVM version) in combination with htmx, and liking it a lot so far. 👍

Of course typed HTML is a big advantage, but one aspect I think isn’t highlighted as much but equally as important IMHO is: much better security out of the box.
Because it isn’t a simple string-based template engine, it knows when to escape input (text nodes and attributes) and reduces common risk like user injected XSS.

[Cies]

Interesting! I would agree that kotlinx.html's README could use some looove. Some more benefits, some more examples (like a htmx example), explaining that it's generated from w3c's HTML spec.

[Cies]

Do you have many pages in kotlinx-html? And do you have any idea how this impacted your compile times? We have ~300 pages and it quite heavily impacted our compile times: the v0.9 release has improved it quite a bit (as it includes some improvements that resulted from some benchmarking i did)

[Peter]

Sorry, but I have nowhere near that many pages and also re-using mainly higher-level custom tags, each in their own file.

Compilation time has not really been an issue so far (this is with the Kotlin incremental compilation enabled).

[Cies]

thanks for letting me know.

[Cies]

of: dankjewel 🙂

[Mikael Ståldal]

I have done the same. A problem I encountered is that is not straightforward to generate a non-well-formed HTML snippet, containing multiple elements without a wrapping element. That is often needed with htmx (e.g. a list of <option>, <tr> or <li>). https://kotlinlang.slack.com/archives/CKWA2MV8U/p1688723457666059

Apart from that, it works fine.

[Peter]

Indeed, the current kotlinx-html doesn’t have support for something like NodeList out of the box (or at least I couldn’t find it).

Have to read some of the previous threads you provided, but I assume something can be added to support this. Worst case, you can add it as a transformResponse HTMX extension.