markup
2025-06-22
markup provides a reader-macro to read HTML/XML tags inside of Common Lisp code
Upstream URL
Author
License
markup
Arnold Noronha arnold@tdrhq.com
Markup let's you write HTML code inside of common lisp, for instance
(let ((x "hello")) <h1>,(progn x) <em>world</em>!</h1>)
Motivation
There are several HTML generation libraries for Common Lisp, for example CL-WHO. However, these libraries follow the Lisp style of building up the structure in parenthesis.
For example, it might look like something like this:
;; CL-WHO syntax, not markup's (:p "hello" (:em "world") "!")
There are many advantages to this structure, but there are a few prominent disadvantages.
First, there's all that double-quotes that becomes hard to track.
Second, and more importantly: There are hundreds of templates and HTML snippets on the internet that are hard to copy-paste into your project if you have to transform them into CL-WHO structures. Time is money.
Finally, it's already hard to hire Lisp engineers. Don't you want to be able to hire designers who might at least modify HTML they recognize inside your lisp project?
Performance
Performance is not a motivation for Markup. We're focussing on developer productivity. For instance, compared to CL-WHO we generate the entire tree of HTML tags before serializing it into the stream at the last step. We haven't reached a situation where this is a bottleneck for our use cases.
Building the tree also lets us build more complex components that can go modify the tree.
It might be possible to build a streaming version of Markup, but that's not on our radar.
Full example with Hunchentoot
(markup:enable-reader) (markup:deftag template (children &key title) <html> <head> <title>,(progn title)</title> </head> <body> ,@(progn children) </body> </html>) (hunchentoot:define-easy-handler (foobar :uri "/") () (markup:write-html <template title="Hello" > <h1>hello world!</h1> </template>))
Installation
markup is available via quicklisp
(ql:quickload "markup")
(If that doesn't load, make sure you update your dists, (ql:update-all-dists))
Editor support
(use-package lisp-markup :load-path "~/quicklisp/dists/quicklisp/software/markup-<version>-git/" :hook (lisp-mode . lisp-markup-minor-mode)) ;; if you don't use use-package (add-to-list 'load-path "~/quicklisp/dists/quicklisp/software/markup-<version>-git/") (require 'lisp-markup) (add-hook 'lisp-mode-hook #'lisp-markup-minor-mode)
FAQ
What about expressions like (< x 2)?
Markdown requires tags to follow the < operator, otherwise (or if it's <=) treats it as a symbol.
Are custom tags namespaced?
Of course, custom tags are just lisp symbols. So you can define a tag like <admin:template>...</admin:template>.
Certain tag names are treated as special (<b>, <body> etc.) since they're HTML elements.
If you want to output the equivalent HTML element for a tag that isn't
treated as special you can also specify the tag using keyword symbols <:foo>..</:foo>.
How do you embed lisp code in markup?
You have already seen some examples in this README. Use ,(...) to
escape some lisp code that returns a single element, or ,@sexp that
returns a list of elements. (Side note, we really don't need to have
both of these, but it matches the backquote syntax much better this
way).
You can also embed lisp code as attribute values.
<a href=(generate-url ...) >...</a>
That is, any expression after the an attribute is read using the
standard Lisp reader. A small caveat to this is that in some cases you need to have a space after the ending >. For instance the following will result in an error:
;; bad code <a href=url-var>...</a> ;; correct code <a href=url-var >...</a>
Is markup used in production?
Yes it is! Right now it's used on several websites we've built. They've solved all of our use cases reliably. The primary website we use this on is Screenshotbot, if you're building web interfaces, you might enjoy using Screenshotbot to keep testing the rendering of your UI in Continuous Integration. (For instance, we use Selenium tests to generate screenshots of Screenshotbot's UI.)
Please do let us know if you use Markup on the sites you're building. We'd love to include them here.
See also
XHP for PHP, and JSX for React both support HTML inside of code for very similar motivations.
@fukamachi released LSX in the same Quicklisp release that markup came out (although his repo goes back much longer, around the time I first started working on Markup internally.). Functionally, it's super similar to Markup and Fukamachi is a pretty fantastic Lisper, and maybe in the future we should consolidate.
License
Apache License, Version 2.0