LanguageCLIBuiltinsLibraryPattern GitHub Search
A language for making websites where you can understand how they're made
LanguageCLIBuiltinsLibraryPattern
Origami is a new programming language that complements HTML and CSS for making small- to medium-scale websites.
Everybody has something to say, and the web is a great place to say it, but creating interesting sites can be hard or expensive. Standard HTML and CSS let you define individual pages, but it’s hard to efficiently create a bunch of pages and organize them into a coherent site.
Corporate site hosting services offer nice drag-and-drop editors but impose creative limitations and high monthly costs. You could build something from scratch — if you master a full programming language like JavaScript and a pile of industrial development tools. The web needs better ways to create sizable, expressive sites at low cost and without entanglements.
Origami is designed for you: someone who wants to make a site for yourself or a small organization, who can HTML and CSS, who’s not a professional developer — or is, but wants to build sites more quickly. Someone who wants to understand how their site actually gets made.
The core idea is to describe the site you want at a high level as concisely as possible. If you can sketch your site like this:
then you can turn that into a small Origami program that orchestrates the creation of your site:
{
// Stylesheets, etc.
assets
// Create a home page listing all the products
index.html = index.ori(products.yaml)
// Create a page for each product
products = map(products.yaml, products.ori)
}
Origami lets you describe how you want to transform your data and files into HTML and the other resources for your site. You can create many things without complex programming: a full-text search feature, RSS feeds for blogs, and so on. You don’t need to know JavaScript, but if you do, you can use it to easily extend what you can do in Origami.
A high-level site definition is enough to let you immediately view and iterate on your site without complex build tools. When you’re ready to publish, Origami turns your site into a collection of plain files you can deploy wherever you want, often for free.
View some example sites
Read the Hello World introduction
Make a small site in the tutorial
Web Origami takes its name from the traditional paper folding art of origami, in which you can transform a flat square of paper into an artwork.