Hey Rob- that was probably unfairly harsh of me. I have tried to like the syntax for the last year and I've had trouble.
Anyway, I know you are a big contributer, do you mind showing me the discussion where we determined '*ngFor=' and '[(two-way)]=' was implemented to play nicely with WC? I would be interested in reading. Thanks!
No, it doesn't play nicely with HTML or XML. It's arbitrarily and pointlessly incompatible with HTML for no good reason, which is a huge easily avoided mistake, that makes me question the judgement of the people who designed (and evangelize) Angular 2. Please see my other posting about that. [1]
My simple question that nobody's been able to answer yet: Name any benefits of the broken Angular 2 template syntax, that couldn't easily be achieved with a non-incompatible, HTML-friendly syntax.
The "Databinding with Web Components" design document [2] makes the dubious claim that "The HTML attribute name of a databound attribute must be escaped in some way."
That is precisely what namespaces are for, so why not simply use namespaces for the purpose they were meant to be used, the same way any well designed standards compliant template languages like Genshi [3] does, instead of inventing a new, non-standard, incompatible syntax?
The entire point of the design of the XML namespace prefix syntax was so that it was compatible with XML syntax. Why do the Angular 2 designers think that was such a bad idea?
I'm not the only person to point this out and have it brushed off and ignored by the Angular 2 team.
"Regardless, it is inappropriate for the angular team to take a hard anti-xml stance." [4]
"I wonder why ngnl presentation and current docs about templates still promoting []()# as parts of new syntax, when opening post in this thread contains 'element.setAttribute('[foo]', 'exp') does not work' and, especially 'SVG requires valid XML and []()# is not valid XML.' If these problems are solved somehow and we just don't know - please let us know." [5]
"Given the lack of xml/SVG compatibility, I would say that the []()# syntax simply fails to meet the constraints, and should be eliminated altogether in favor of the prefix proposal." [6]
"Please don't break HTML syntax :( I love Angular because I can write templates for it in any templating language like SLIM or HAML or Jade (you can't do it in Ember or React, for example). Introducing non-standard characters in attributes makes templating languages unusable (as well as syntax coloring and introspection in IDE)." [7]
