go-html/docs/architecture.md

title	description
Architecture	Internals of the go-html HLCRF DOM compositor, covering the node interface, layout system, responsive wrapper, grammar pipeline, WASM module, and codegen CLI.

Architecture

go-html is structured around a single interface, a layout compositor, and a server-side analysis pipeline. Everything renders to string -- there is no virtual DOM, no diffing, and no retained state between renders.

Node Interface

Every renderable unit implements one method:

type Node interface {
    Render(ctx *Context) string
}

All concrete node types are unexported structs with exported constructor functions. The public API surface consists of nine node constructors, four accessibility helpers, plus the Attr() and Render() helpers:

Constructor	Behaviour
El(tag, ...Node)	HTML element with children. Void elements (br, img, input, etc.) never emit a closing tag.
Attr(Node, key, value)	Sets an attribute on an El node. Traverses through If, Unless, and Entitled wrappers. Returns the node for chaining.
AriaLabel(Node, label)	Convenience helper that sets aria-label on an element node.
AltText(Node, text)	Convenience helper that sets alt on an element node.
TabIndex(Node, index)	Convenience helper that sets tabindex on an element node.
AutoFocus(Node)	Convenience helper that sets autofocus on an element node.
Text(key, ...any)	Translated text via the active context translator. Server builds fall back to global go-i18n; JS builds fall back to the key. Output is always HTML-escaped.
Raw(content)	Unescaped trusted content. Explicit escape hatch.
If(cond, Node)	Renders the child only when the condition function returns true.
Unless(cond, Node)	Renders the child only when the condition function returns false.
Each[T](items, fn)	Iterates a slice and renders each item via a mapping function. Generic over T.
EachSeq[T](items, fn)	Same as Each but accepts an iter.Seq[T] instead of a slice.
Switch(selector, cases)	Renders one of several named cases based on a runtime selector function. Returns empty string when no case matches.
Entitled(feature, Node)	Renders the child only when the context's entitlement function grants the named feature. Deny-by-default: returns empty string when no entitlement function is set.

Safety Guarantees

• XSS prevention: Text() nodes always HTML-escape their output via html.EscapeString(). User-supplied strings passed through Text() cannot inject HTML.
• Attribute escaping: Attribute values are escaped with html.EscapeString(), handling &, <, >, ", and '.
• Deterministic output: Attribute keys on El nodes are sorted alphabetically before rendering, producing identical output regardless of insertion order.
• Void elements: A lookup table of 13 void elements (area, base, br, col, embed, hr, img, input, link, meta, source, track, wbr) ensures these never emit a closing tag.
• Deny-by-default entitlements: Entitled returns an empty string when the context is nil, when no entitlement function is set, or when the function returns false. Content is absent from the DOM, not merely hidden.

Rendering Context

The Context struct carries per-request state through the node tree during rendering:

type Context struct {
    Identity     string                     // e.g. user ID or session identifier
    Locale       string                     // BCP 47 locale string
    Entitlements func(feature string) bool  // feature gate callback
    Data         map[string]any             // arbitrary per-request data
    service      Translator                 // unexported; set via constructor
}

Two constructors are provided:

• NewContext() creates a context with sensible defaults and an empty Data map.
• NewContextWithService(svc) creates a context backed by any translator implementing T(key, ...any) string such as *i18n.Service.

The service field is intentionally unexported. When nil, server builds fall back to the global i18n.T() default while JS builds render the key unchanged. This prevents callers from setting the service inconsistently after construction while keeping the WASM import graph lean.

HLCRF Layout

The Layout type is a compositor for five named slots:

Slot Letter	Semantic Element	ARIA Role	Accessor
H	<header>	banner	layout.H(...)
L	<aside>	complementary	layout.L(...)
C	<main>	main	layout.C(...)
R	<aside>	complementary	layout.R(...)
F	<footer>	contentinfo	layout.F(...)

Variant String

The variant string passed to NewLayout() determines which slots render and in which order:

NewLayout("HLCRF")  // all five slots
NewLayout("HCF")    // header, content, footer (no sidebars)
NewLayout("C")      // content only
NewLayout("LC")     // left sidebar and content

Slot letters not present in the variant string are ignored, even if nodes have been appended to those slots. Unrecognised characters (lowercase, digits, special characters) are silently skipped -- no error is returned.

Deterministic Block IDs

Each rendered slot receives a data-block attribute encoding its position in the layout tree. At the root level, IDs follow the pattern {slot}-0:

<header role="banner" data-block="H-0">...</header>
<main role="main" data-block="C-0">...</main>
<footer role="contentinfo" data-block="F-0">...</footer>

Block IDs are constructed by simple string concatenation (no fmt.Sprintf) to keep the fmt package out of the WASM import graph.

Nested Layouts

Layout implements Node, so a layout can be placed inside any slot of another layout. At render time, nested layouts are cloned and their internal path field is set to the parent's block ID as a prefix. This produces hierarchical paths:

inner := html.NewLayout("HCF").
    H(html.Raw("nav")).
    C(html.Raw("body")).
    F(html.Raw("links"))

outer := html.NewLayout("HLCRF").
    H(html.Raw("top")).
    L(inner).              // inner layout nested in the Left slot
    C(html.Raw("main")).
    F(html.Raw("foot"))

The inner layout's slots render with prefixed block IDs: L-0-H-0, L-0-C-0, L-0-F-0. At 10 levels of nesting, the deepest block ID becomes C-0-C-0-C-0-C-0-C-0-C-0-C-0-C-0-C-0-C-0 (tested in edge_test.go).

The clone-on-render approach means the original layout is never mutated. This is safe for concurrent use.

Fluent Builder

All slot methods return *Layout for chaining. Multiple nodes can be appended to the same slot across multiple calls:

html.NewLayout("HCF").
    H(html.El("h1", html.Text("page.title"))).
    C(html.El("p", html.Text("intro"))).
    C(html.El("p", html.Text("body"))).       // appends to the same C slot
    F(html.El("small", html.Text("footer")))

Block ID Parsing

ParseBlockID() in path.go extracts the slot letter sequence from a data-block attribute value:

ParseBlockID("L-0-C-0")       // returns ['L', 'C']
ParseBlockID("C-0-C-0-C-0")   // returns ['C', 'C', 'C']
ParseBlockID("H-0")           // returns ['H']
ParseBlockID("")              // returns nil

This enables server-side or client-side code to locate a specific block in the rendered tree by its structural path.

Responsive Compositor

Responsive wraps multiple named Layout variants for breakpoint-aware rendering:

html.NewResponsive().
    Variant("desktop", html.NewLayout("HLCRF").
        H(html.Raw("header")).L(html.Raw("nav")).C(html.Raw("main")).
        R(html.Raw("aside")).F(html.Raw("footer"))).
    Variant("tablet", html.NewLayout("HCF").
        H(html.Raw("header")).C(html.Raw("main")).F(html.Raw("footer"))).
    Variant("mobile", html.NewLayout("C").
        C(html.Raw("main")))

Each variant renders inside a <div data-variant="name"> container. Variants render in insertion order. CSS media queries or JavaScript can target these containers for show/hide logic.

VariantSelector(name) returns a CSS attribute selector for a specific responsive variant, making stylesheet targeting less error-prone than hand-writing the attribute selector repeatedly.

Responsive implements Node, so it can be passed to Render() or Imprint(). The Variant() method accepts *Layout specifically, not arbitrary Node values.

Each variant maintains independent block ID namespaces -- nesting a layout inside a responsive variant does not conflict with the same layout structure in another variant.

Grammar Pipeline (Server-Side Only)

The grammar pipeline is excluded from WASM builds via //go:build !js on pipeline.go. It bridges the rendering layer to the semantic analysis layer.

StripTags

func StripTags(html string) string

Converts rendered HTML to plain text. Tag boundaries are collapsed into single spaces; the result is trimmed. The implementation is a single-pass rune scanner with no regular expressions and no allocations beyond the output strings.Builder. It does not handle <script> or <style> content because go-html never generates those elements.

Imprint

func Imprint(node Node, ctx *Context) reversal.GrammarImprint

Runs the full render-to-analysis pipeline:

1. Renders the node tree to HTML via node.Render(ctx).
2. Strips HTML tags via StripTags() to extract plain text.
3. Tokenises the text via go-i18n/reversal.NewTokeniser().Tokenise().
4. Wraps tokens in a reversal.GrammarImprint for structural analysis.

The resulting GrammarImprint exposes TokenCount, UniqueVerbs, and a Similar() method for pairwise semantic similarity scoring.

A nil context is handled gracefully: Imprint creates a default context internally.

CompareVariants

func CompareVariants(r *Responsive, ctx *Context) map[string]float64

Runs Imprint independently on each named layout variant in a Responsive and returns pairwise similarity scores. Keys are formatted as "name1:name2".

This enables detection of semantically divergent responsive variants -- for example, a mobile layout that strips critical information present in the desktop variant. Same-content variants with different layout structures (e.g. HLCRF vs HCF) score above 0.8 similarity.

A single-variant Responsive produces an empty score map (no pairs to compare).

WASM Module

The WASM entry point at cmd/wasm/main.go is compiled with GOOS=js GOARCH=wasm and exposes a single JavaScript function:

gohtml.renderToString(variant, locale, slots)

Parameters:

• variant (string): HLCRF variant string, e.g. "HCF".
• locale (string): BCP 47 locale string for i18n, e.g. "en-GB".
• slots (object): Optional keys H, L, C, R, F containing HTML strings.

Slot content is injected via Raw(). The caller is responsible for sanitisation -- the WASM module is a rendering engine for trusted content produced server-side or by the application's own templates.

Size Budget

The WASM binary has a size gate enforced by cmd/wasm/size_test.go:

Metric	Limit	Current
Raw binary	3.5 MB	~2.90 MB
Gzip compressed	1 MB	~842 KB

The test builds the WASM binary as a subprocess and is skipped under go test -short. The Makefile wasm target performs the same build with size checking.

Server/Client Split

The binary split is enforced by Go build tags:

File	Build Tag	Reason for WASM Exclusion
pipeline.go	!js	Imports go-i18n/reversal
cmd/wasm/register.go	!js	Imports encoding/json and text/template

The WASM binary includes only: node types, layout, responsive, context, render, path, and go-i18n core translation. No codegen, no pipeline, no JSON, no templates, no fmt.

Codegen CLI

cmd/codegen/main.go generates Web Component JavaScript bundles from HLCRF slot assignments at build time:

echo '{"H":"nav-bar","C":"main-content","F":"page-footer"}' | go run ./cmd/codegen/ > components.js

The codegen package (codegen/codegen.go) generates ES2022 class definitions with closed Shadow DOM. For each custom element tag, it produces:

1. A class extending HTMLElement with a private #shadow field.
2. constructor() attaching a closed shadow root (mode: "closed").
3. connectedCallback() dispatching a wc-ready custom event with the tag name and slot.
4. render(html) method that sets shadow content from a <template> clone.
5. A customElements.define() registration call.

Tag names must contain a hyphen (Web Components specification requirement). TagToClassName() converts kebab-case to PascalCase: nav-bar becomes NavBar, my-super-widget becomes MySuperWidget.

GenerateBundle() deduplicates tags -- if the same tag is assigned to multiple slots, only one class definition is emitted.

The codegen CLI uses encoding/json and text/template, which are excluded from the WASM build. Consumers generate the JS bundle at build time and serve it as a static asset.

Data Flow Summary

                         Server-Side
                    +-------------------+
                    |                   |
  Node tree ------->  Render(ctx)      |-----> HTML string
                    |                   |
                    |  StripTags()      |-----> plain text
                    |                   |
                    |  Imprint()        |-----> GrammarImprint
                    |                   |         .TokenCount
                    |  CompareVariants()|         .UniqueVerbs
                    |                   |         .Similar()
                    +-------------------+

                         WASM Client
                    +-------------------+
                    |                   |
  JS call --------->  renderToString() |-----> HTML string
  (variant, locale, |                   |
   slots object)    +-------------------+

                         Build Time
                    +-------------------+
                    |                   |
  JSON slot map --->  cmd/codegen/     |-----> Web Component JS
  (stdin)           |                   |       (stdout)
                    +-------------------+