f34nk
The landscape of available Elixir packages for html tooling is overseeable but in that sense also very focused. Each library is there for a distinct use case.
For that reason I compiled a quick overview of the available html tools in Elixir.
Right now I only covered: Floki, HtmlSanitizeEx, Meeseeks, Myhtmlex, ModestEx
In my humble conclusion, I state that benchmarking is not very useful since the goal and main strength of each library is different. Also the tested methods are not really comparable, since the implemented overhead is very different between each library. It is safe to say that all libraries perform very very fast.
All in all, I would say, the focused nature of the tools makes it easy for the user to pick the right tool for the job.
However, the ecosystem of tools is still quite young. There is room for improvement.
Please feel invited to discuss missing features or differences to other libraries in other languages.
Best, f34nk
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mischov
I think it might be worthwhile to indicate whether a parser is HTML5 compliant (so Floki with html5ever parser but not default parser, Meeseeks, Myhtmlex, and ModestEx).
Also, Floki arguably has facilities for manipulating nodes: Floki — Floki v0.38.4.
Edit: Also, it’s probably beyond the scope of an overview of HTML tools, but I kind of wish there was an explicit indicator of whether a library is intended to be used with XML- I see a fair amount of people reaching for Floki to work with XML when it just doesn’t have parsers intended for it.
f34nk
Good point. I will add a column to the table.
Also true. I forgot. It is a feature that is easy to oversee however. I will also add this info to the table. Is
Floki.map/2only limited to changing attributes?Yes I also agree here. But how would you like to see this information represented?
Really? That seems odd. Xml and html are completely different languages. Maybe they use the default parser and hope for the best.
Also popular resources like awesome-elixir only have a section for “XML” but not explicitly “HTML”. I think this is misleading!
I opened up an issue on awesome-elixir to add a new section “HTML”.
mischov
As far as I can tell it only works for changing an element’s tag or its attributes.
Yeah, a lot of people use the mochiweb_html parser, which does an ok job with XML, but I’ve even seen people using the html5ever parser and that’s just a bad idea.
People using html5ever for parsing XML was one of the main motivations I had for adding an XML parser to Meeseeks- if they were going to try to do it anyway I wanted to provide a good parser for them to use.
mischov
Also it might be worth adding some kind of footnote for the Meeseeks/Floki benchmark.
f34nk
Do you plan to add functions that let you manipulate nodes to Meeseeks?
Actually that was the motivation for me to start ModestEx, because I missed those features in other libraries. Or is it just me and people only need to parse HTML and not change it?
mischov
I’m pretty hesitant to at the moment- adding nodes in the right place as per the HTML5 spec, etc, is a pretty complicated topic, as is figuring out efficient ways to update what I currently treat as an immutable structure (the Document).
Meeseeks has from the first been designed as a tool to search for and extract data from HTML (and now XML), which is the purpose I use it for, and for the foreseeable future I plan to limit it to that.
mbenatti
Hey @f34nk, I only used
flokiin my projects and it suits for my needs.I’m taking a look at your project
https://github.com/f34nk/modest_exand it seems awesome!Good work dude, if I found something useful or missing about html tools I’ll post here!
f34nk
Thanks man.
But what about drab, EEx and Phoenix.HTML?
Strictly speaking these are also “html tools”.
I would love to see more html processing on the backend side, rather then pushing half backed data to the client and let them figure out the rest.
I mean, website performance (and with that user experience) has gotten so worse since everything is being done “on load” or “async”.
f34nk
https://github.com/h4cc/awesome-elixir#html
mbenatti
You’r right, I agree with you!
I used both in my projects, including drab!
I miss more activity by the community for tools like Drab and for components like Phoenix Awesomplete form helper…
I like Drab and its powerful however I can’t see companies/projects showcases using it yet.