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0 pointsbdcravens2y ago0 comments

PHP, ColdFusion, etc allows you to intermix HTML and variables without doing the type of escaping you're describing.

For instance, CFML:

<ul> <cfoutput query="people"> <li>#firstName# #lastName# </cfouput> </ul>

You can also write classes that return data and custom tags that return rendered html.

<cf_PeopleList queryObject="#people#">

I'm not saying we need to go back to those languages necessarily, but I think there's a ton of misconception about how those languages can be used, and quite a bit of reinventing the wheel in the Javascript world.

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eropple2y ago

Sure, of course you can in some contexts and with many asterisks (though in PHP it is literally text munging and that's what you get).

But even, granting your correction: in the CF example you're writing representation and logic in two separate contexts. JSX does not do that. JSX is JavaScript and the constructs that JavaScript provides work without fail with the constructed trees (which need not be DOM trees, e.g. react-three-fiber) you're generating. It puts a lot of strain on the assertion that you must-repeat-must separate these concerns, which hasn't been materially true really at any point in my career all the way back to JSP or Velocity templates where (much like ColdFusion) you had worse tools for one context than you got for free with the other.

While JSX and something like CFML (or hell, Angular) look similar when you squint, this is a different thing. The closest equivalent is something like Scala or Visual Basic XML literals, which never took off; JSX is no-bullshit a step change in consistency and productivity and it's awesome.

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