Haskell in web browser/Haskell web toolkit
Haskell Web Toolkit (further referred to as HsWTK) is a thin layer built on top of DOM interfaces. It provides program interfaces to compose static layout of a web application page, and to hook up visual elements of an application to event handlers and XML HTTP communication means. HsWTK hides the low-level DOM APIs where possible; however their knowledge may be necessary to develop certain types of visual components and event handlers.
To build a web-based GUI, HsWTK defines the following type:
type Widget = THTMLDocument -> THTMLElement -> Bool
That is, Widget is a function, or, to be a more precise, an action (as evaluation of this function does assume side effects). This action's first argument, of type THTMLDocument, refers to the HTML document containing the GUI elements. The action's second argument, of type THTMLElement, refers to a parent HTML element. This makes perfect sense from the DOM standpoint, as in order to create a visible element on a Web page, it is at least necessary to create an element by calling
Document.createElement method (which needs a Document), and next to insert the newly created element into some (parent) node by calling
1.1 HTML elements as widgets
So, inside the Widget action, some work may be done to create a HTML element, and make it a child of some other Widget. This is generalized by HsWTK as Element Creation Function, and defined as
type ECRF n = (THTMLDocument -> CPS Bool n)
Now, if we refer to Maker functions defined for HTML-tagged Elements we may see some similarity:
mkDiv :: CHTMLDocument a => a -> CPS c THTMLDivElement
If we substitute n in ECRF definition with THTMLDivElement, and remember that THTMLDocument is an instance of CHTMLDocument, we get a perfect match. From this, it may be concluded that Maker functions may serve as Element creation functions.
1.2 Passive widgets
The simpliest form of Widget is passive widget. Passive widgets only display themselves as part of Web GUI, but are not capable of nesting other widgets. A good example of such passive widget is text label or non-clickable image.
HsWTK defines a function
passive which given an Element Creation Function, returns a Widget:
passive :: CNode n => ECRF n -> Widget
Thus, given a Maker function (e. g. mkImg), applying passive to it creates an image which will appear in the proper place of a Web page.