"<!DOCTYPE html>\n"
+
html
[ (attrs.lang metadata.lang) ]
[
(head [ ] [ (partials.head context) ])
(body
[
(attrs.classes [
"font-sans"
"bg-white"
])
I understand that this is very flexible and powerful, but it immediately makes the templates highly non-portable and requiring of hand-authorship— fine for a personal blog by a code nerd, but a non-starter for when a designer is involved who will want to use visual tools. I see that right below that there's also a "normal string templating" option that's closer to conventional jinja2 or the like, but it's ultimately still pretty nix-ified.It might be worth some ifd [1] to allow a step that pre-processes conventional html + tags template files into the form that can be consumed by nixtml.
[1]: or the still-experimental dynamic derivations: https://fzakaria.com/2025/03/10/an-early-look-at-nix-dynamic...
After using Nix for a while I got pretty fed up with the (subjective) unintuitiveness of the language†. It wasn't even that I thought it was a bad language, I just couldn't het it to click (and doubly so after the advent of flakes).
All the same it seems to me like if you grok it it's a great fit for constructing recipes for building things reliably that are part of huge dependency trees, and so it's natural that it would be a good website generator too.
† Luckily others shared this issue, and the result was Guix which solves that problem while introducing its own.
YAML/TOML? These are the maximum of punishment I'm willing to deal with, as they are quite universal and useful in many situations.
If you need a complex touring complete config, you better use a reasonably popular general purpose language, or I'm not touching it.
And before someone says, "well you can work on your dream static site generator yourself", rest assured, I am, but I'm also very lazy and usually stop once it gets to a "good enough" state for my own use, but isn't quite ready to share with others.