Idyll-lang: Make your app stand out with interactive data-driven stories

What is idyll?

Idyll is an open-source markup language and toolkit for producing interactive web pages. You give Idyll a markup file, and it compiles that file to a full bundle of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS that can run in anyone’s web browser.

At its core, Idyll is a markup language. Not just any markup language, Idyll let’s you leverage a modular/component approach like any modern language. Idyll also lets you reuse third party packages (npm) and can be combined optionally with React.

The traditional end-to-end procedure for Idyll;

• You initialize a standalone project per document.
• You write code for the formula, graph, chart, etc.
• Once finished, you publish/deploy the document and embed it to your website/SPA.

Idyll is great at creating charts with 5 lines of code.

Look how smooth that rendering is. Let’s give Idyll a go, here’s the browser editor.

Write some basic markup as usual. At it’s surface it looks like regular markup.

Here’s where it gets cool. We can use components, variables and math equations inside our markup.

Let’s spin up a pie chart.

Notice the logic and the components are inside the bracket syntax []

Sweet! Idyll has built-in components which we can reuse. In case you’re curious, the properties you can pass to the chart component are the following.

Equations

Idyll uses KaTeX to typeset mathematical equations.

Fixed

Content inside of a fixed component will be locked in place, even when the rest of the document scrolls. The scroll example uses the fixed component to keep the dynamic chart in place:

List of all built-in components.

Getting started with Idyll

Using d3 with Idyll

Using Idyll with NPM

Idyll is one way to make your app stand out. Now go out there and build something awesome!

Thanks for reading! ❤