web-view

Type-safe HTML and CSS with intuitive layouts and composable styles.

https://github.com/seanhess/web-view

Stackage Nightly 2025-03-11:0.7.0
Latest on Hackage:0.7.0

See all snapshots web-view appears in

BSD-3-Clause licensed by Sean Hess
Maintained by [email protected]
This version can be pinned in stack with:web-view-0.7.0@sha256:fb5e5151b0071d42b48aac09f9256e1d53b1b916fdfbf04a5556ad44fc444a7f,2675

Web View

Hackage

Type-safe HTML and CSS with intuitive layout and composable styles. Inspired by Tailwindcss and Elm-UI

Write Haskell instead of CSS

Type-safe utility functions to generate styled HTML.

myPage = col (gap 10) $ do
  el (bold . fontSize 32) "My page"
  button (border 1) "Click Me"

Leverage the full power of Haskell functions for reuse, instead of relying on CSS.

header = bold
h1 = header . fontSize 32
h2 = header . fontSize 24
page = gap 10

myPage = col page $ do
  el h1 "My Page"
  ...

This approach is inspired by Tailwindcss’ Utility Classes

Intuitive Layouts

Easily create layouts with row, col, grow, and space

holygrail :: View c ()
holygrail = layout id $ do
  row section "Top Bar"
  row grow $ do
    col section "Left Sidebar"
    col (section . grow) "Main Content"
    col section "Right Sidebar"
  row section "Bottom Bar"
  where section = 'border' 1

Embedded CSS

Views track which styles are used in any child node, and automatically embed all CSS when rendered.

>>> renderText $ el bold "Hello"

<style type='text/css'>.bold { font-weight:bold }</style>
<div class='bold'>Hello</div>

Stateful Styles

We can apply styles when certain states apply. For example, to change the background on hover:

button (bg Primary . hover (bg PrimaryLight)) "Hover Me"

Media states allow us to create responsive designs

el (width 100 . media (MinWidth 800) (width 400))
  "Big if window > 800"

Try Example Project with Nix

If you want to get a feel for web-view without cloning the project run nix run github:seanhess/web-view to run the example webserver locally

Local Development

Nix

Prepend targets with ghc982 or ghc966 to use GHC 9.8.2 or GHC 9.6.6

  • nix run starts the example project with GHC 9.8.2
  • nix develop to get a shell with all dependencies installed for GHC 9.8.2.
  • nix develop .#ghc966-web-view for GHC 9.6.6

You can also get a development shell for the example project with:

cd example
nix develop ../#ghc982-example
cabal run

You can import this flake’s overlay to add web-view to all package sets and override ghc966 and ghc982 with the packages to satisfy web-view’s dependencies.

{
  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:nixos/nixpkgs/nixpkgs-unstable";
    web-view.url = "github:seanhess/web-view"; # or "path:/path/to/cloned/web-view";
    flake-utils.url = "github:numtide/flake-utils";
  };

  outputs = { self, nixpkgs, web-view, flake-utils, ... }:
    flake-utils.lib.eachDefaultSystem (
      system:
      let
        pkgs = import nixpkgs {
          inherit system;
          overlays = [ web-view.overlays.default ];
        };
        haskellPackagesOverride = pkgs.haskell.packages.ghc966.override (old: {
          overrides = pkgs.lib.composeExtensions (old.overrides or (_: _: { })) (hfinal: hprev: {
            # your overrides here
          });
        });
      in
      {
        devShells.default = haskellPackagesOverride.shellFor {
          packages = p: [ p.web-view ];
        };
      }
    );
}

Learn More

View Documentation on Hackage

View on Github

View Examples

Contributors

Changes

Revision history for web-view

0.7.0

  • stack, popup, offset, layer - more intuitive interface
  • added Web.View.Url.renderPath
  • Style class
  • added code, lists

0.6.0

  • stack - layout children on top of each other
  • ChildCombinator: apply styles to direct children
  • Mod is now Mod context, allowing for type-safe Mods
  • fixed: escaping in auto-generated <style>
  • Refactored: selectors and rendering

0.5.0

  • Rendering improvements
  • extClass to add external css class
  • inline elements
  • Url: no longer lowercases automatically. Show/Read instance

0.4.0

  • Added new Mods. Length type. Improved Url type

0.3.1

  • Cleanup. Refactored Mods

0.2.3 – 2023-11-27

  • First version. Released on an unsuspecting world.