BlazeHtml 0.1

A first release of the BlazeHtml project
Published on June 20, 2010 under the tag haskell

This is another blogpost about BlazeHtml – the project I am working on for Google Summer of Code for haskell.org. Today, I am glad to announce we have a first version of BlazeHtml ready for use. Note that this is a 0.1 release – so beware of bugs. We have also created a website for the project.

Support for HTML 4 Strict and HTML 5

We support HTML 5 as well as HTML 4 Strict. In the feature, we hope to expand this set to the other (X)HTML variants, and perhaps XML. There is no “default” HTML specified: it depends entirely on the modules you import. For example. if you want HTML 4, you import Text.Blaze.Html4.Strict, whereas if you want HTML 5, you need to import Text.Blaze.Html5.

Pretty fast

We think that BlazeHtml is pretty fast and have some benchmarks supporting these claims. There’s more information available on the benchmarks page about that.

Documentation

Documentation can never be underestimated: it is of vital importance if you want people to use your library. There is a preliminary tutorial available for now, and two examples.

Outlook

So, after this first release, here is a list of things we will focus on next:

Expand the implementation so that we can support fast output of String and Text as well as UTF-8 encoded ByteString.
Add more HTML/XHTML variants.
Examine the possibility to improve our changes to Data.Binary.Builder for general use in a separate library (Utf8Builder, TextBuilder, …).
Write a BlazeHtml generator translating a Html page to the corresponding BlazeHtml haskell code. This greatly simplifies initial imports and importing of new snippets.

Feedback

As always, feedback is more than welcome! This is a community project, after all. If you’re interested, also check out the blogs of the other Google Summer of Code participants for haskell.org!