• Header Meta
• Nesting
• Linebreak Mode
• Raw Mode

Syntext supports an indentation-based shorthand syntax for generating arbitrary HTML:

:tag [arguments] [.class] [#id] [&attr] [attr="value"]
    block content
    ...

A shorthand block opens with a header line containing a colon, a HTML tag, and, optionally, a set of attributes. The block's content consists of all subsequent blank or indented lines following the header.

The block's content can be indented by any number of spaces; the common indent is stripped and the first non-indented line ends the block. Leading and trailing blank lines are also trimmed from the content.

To take a simple example, the markup below:

:div
    This is a paragraph.

generates the following HTML:

<div>
    <p>This is a paragraph.</p>
</div>

Header Meta

A block header can contain a single ID, any number of classes, and any number of named attributes, e.g:

:div .foo .bar #baz
    This is a paragraph.

generates the following HTML:

<div class="foo bar" id="baz">
    <p>This is a paragraph.</p>
</div>

Boolean attributes can be specified using an & symbol, e.g. &checked. Attributes with values can be specified without quotes as long as the value does not contain spaces, e.g.

:div attr1=foo attr2="bar baz"

Nesting

Blocks can be nested to any depth, e.g:

:div .outer
    :div .inner
        This is a paragraph.

will generate the following HTML:

<div class="outer">
    <div class="inner">
        <p>This is a paragraph.</p>
    </div>
</div>

Linebreak Mode

A nl2lb argument can be added to any block to turn on newline-to-linebreak mode for all nested content:

:div nl2lb
    Linebreaks in this paragraph
    will be preserved.

This argument has an alias, nl2br, which is exactly equivalent.

Raw Mode

You can add a raw argument to any block. This instructs Syntext to preserve the block's content as-is without any further processing.

:div raw
    This content will be preserved in its raw state.