comnt - template content using block-annotated comments

A small, simple, human-friendly way to manage template regions using standard comment syntax — no weird symbols, no broken files, no preprocessing to view your code in a browser.

Source templates remain fully functional working HTML and JavaScript code that can be opened, viewed, and tested directly in browsers.

One huge practical benefit: you can inject actual JavaScript-ready values from Python— not just strings or you can refer to javascript functions defined elsewhere. That means you don’t need to wrap your data in quotes and then call JSON.parse(...) on the frontend, like you often do with Jinja2.

With Jinja2 we need:

const user = JSON.parse('{{ user_data | tojson | safe }}');
or even sometimes:
const user = JSON.parse(JSON.stringify( '{{ user_data | tojson | safe }}'));

With comnt:

const data = /*[user_data*/ {'name' : 'Alice' }
/*user_data]*/;

Two supported tag-comment styles:

HTML:

<p>
<!--[user_info-->
User Placeholder
<!--user_info]-->
</p>

Javascript/css:

/*[tag_name*/
const arr_to_change = [0,1]
/*tag_name]*/

These files stay 100% valid — editable and previewable in browser.

• Designer and developer see exactly the same.
• No regex – pure string methods
• Frontend-friendly – what devs and designers see is what they get
• Easy on the eyes – clean [tag_name] blocks

Example use

import comnt
template = """
  <!--[title-->
    Title to be replaced
  <!--title]-->
"""
output = render(template, {"title": "A new title"})
print(output)

Philosophy

Logic-less templates help clearly separate design from data. Generating HTML in code is often simpler than using a full-blown templating system.

For example, using tinyhtml we can:

from tinyhtml import h
html = h("ul")(
    h("li")(str(n)) for n in range(3)
)

With modern CSS (like Tailwind or scoped selectors), you can precisely target any part of the HTML.
Inspired by CSS-Tricks: Class Up! Templates, Not Content — the idea is to isolate dynamic logic in comments, keeping your markup clean and maintainable https://css-tricks.com/class-up-templates-not-content/

MIT licence.