vibe.d: is it possible to use bare HTML with the functionalty of DIET templates ?

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On 8/30/21 8:09 PM, someone wrote:
> Regarding vibe.d I think I'll give it a try (maybe placing it behind 
> nginx at first) since I do really got a good first-impression ... kudos 
> to the developers/maintainers :)
> 
> I like the idea of having D at my disposal within a web page, actually, 
> it is a terrific feature to say the least.
> 
> What I do not like (even a bit) are the pseudo-HTML DIET templates. I 
> can understand they can make life easy for some, but I am not the guy 
> having any trouble writing well-good-structured HTML/XHTML/XML/etc to 
> begin with, nor I am the kind of guy grunting because I will be forced 
> to write closing tags and the like.
> 
> That being said, my specific question is:
> 
> Can I use vibe.d *without* DIET templates manually writing say, XHTML 
> 1.1 pages, *while having D* at my disposal with the - prefixes I have 
> seen so far ?

The generation of code to output the page depends on the diet file 
format (i.e. code islands are designated by the leading `-`).

However, vibe-d does not require using the diet template system. There 
are others which probably do what you want (search on code.dlang.org), 
but I'm a huge fan of diet templates (I actually prefer writing 
non-template html that way), so I don't have any experience with others.

Given how templating systems work (and how D allows strings to be used 
as code using mixins), it's likely pretty trivial to write a simple 
templating system to do this. All you need is an escape protocol that is 
unlikely to appear in HTML, and you can probably get away with a 10 line 
function that doesn't need to actually parse the HTML.

-Steve