kTemplate

a minimalist python html template

Quick Start

Installation

pip install kTemplate

Examples

from kTemplate import (
  div, img, # common html elements
  element   # for creating custom element
)

# create common html element
# `class` represents by `cls` due to python keyword
html_str = div(img(src='url'), cls='bar')
# <div class="bar"><img src="url"/></div>

# create custom element
my_element = element(tag="MyElement", content="foo" props="bar")
# <MyElement props="ar">foo</MyElement>

Please refer to the docs for creating HTML templates and components

Documentation

Read the documentation for more about:

usage details
function references
contributing
testing
changelog

Motivation

When building web apps with python, no matter using Flask, FastAPI or Django, the go-to template is Jinja. This is a sensible choice when building web app. However it's a bit over-kill when creating simple website. Also, I am not a fan of Jinja's template syntax, eg. putting python loops in html with {% ... %} looks clumsy:

<ul id="navigation">
{% for item in navigation %}
    <li><a href="{{ item.href }}">{{ item.caption }}</a></li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>

I prefer something like this instead:

ul(
  id = "navigation",
  content = [
    li(
      a(item.caption, href=item.href)
    )
    for item in navigation
  ]  
)

Its pure python, having full support of intellisense, type checking, and all language supports from the text editor. I feel much better DX with this approach.

Separation of concern sounds good, but it comes with a cost: adding another concern 🤪... So separating HTML with python is not always a good choice, especially in simple projects.

Mixing template logic within python eliminates the extra layer of complexity, which I think is a reasonable choice for small/medium size projects. There are libraries provide in-python html template, such as Dominate and fast-html.

Dominate is a well designed lib and I'll certainly go for it for medium sized project. Their with element_name pattern is a brilliant use of python context manager, highly recommended 👍. However, for simple project, I'm still looking for a simpler solution.

fast-html come close to what I want. It uses python generator as element output to speed up the template concatenation process. This is a efficient technical choice, and I think that's why the author name it "fast" html. But still, when dealing with simple or even single page demo sites, pure text elements is what I am looking for instead of generator. Performance hit is negligible in that case.

That's why I create this text centric html template library, and share it on PyPi. I name it "k" template because... just after my initial 😜. Hope u find it useful.

Need Help?

Open a github issue or ping me on Twitter