Chapter 5. Displaying content
This chapter covers
- Templates and template engines
- The Go template libraries text/template and html/template
- Actions, pipelines, and functions in templates
- Nesting of templates and layouts
A web template is a predesigned HTML page that’s used repeatedly by a software program, called a template engine, to generate one or more HTML pages. Web template engines are an important part of any web application framework, and most if not all full-fledged frameworks have one. Although a number of frameworks have embedded template engines, many frameworks use a mix-and-match strategy that allows programmers to choose the template engine they prefer.
Go is no exception. Although Go is a relatively new programming language, there are already a few template engines built on it. However the Go’s standard library provides strong template support through the text/template and html/template libraries, and unsurprisingly, most Go frameworks support these libraries as the default template engine.
In this chapter we’ll focus on these two libraries and show how they can be used to generate HTML responses.
Template engines often combine data with templates to produce the final HTML (see figure 5.1). Handlers usually call template engines to combine data with the templates and return the resultant HTML to the client.
