[Suggestion] HTML string type for IDEs

[aciccarello]

Motivation

ES6 Template strings make it much easier to put blocks of HTML code inline with JavaScript. This can be leveraged in frameworks like Angular. One disadvantage to this though, is that IDEs don't know that the string block should be formatted as HTML so there is no syntax highlighting.

@Component({ selector: 'angular-demo' })
@View({
  template: `<h3>My Template</h3>
             <p>I can put blocks of HTML here.</p>
             <p>Unfortunately, there is no syntax highlighting.</p>`
})
class Demo{ }

Proposal

I propose a simple HTMLString type that is simply an alias for string but can signal to text editors that the string should be styled as HTML and can use HTML completion. This should be implemented in lib.d.ts to standardize the use of the type.

/**
 * Alias for the string type used to denote the string should be shown with
 * HTML syntax highlighting
 */
type HTMLString = string;

Strengths:

• Simple to implement
• No breaking changes
• IDE support is optional

Weaknesses:

• Requires IDEs to be interested in implementing

[mhegazy]

I do not think the type is that helpful here for two reasons, 1. it requires the editors to be interested, involved and aware, and if so why not do it on their own, and 2. all syntactic operations are not type aware, changing this would add a huge perf overhead and would delay operations that today users expect to be instantaneous (e.g. colorization/highlighting)

I would say this is a valid issue for https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript-Sublime-Plugin, colorizing this should be doable in string template positions, and you would get that all the time not only in specified places.