Improving the Markdown Preview Tool with Templates

As the final improvement to the mdp tool, we’ll update the way it writes the final HTML file. We currently have the HTML header and footer hard-coded in the program. It’s a good start, but it makes the tool less flexible and harder to maintain. To address this issue, we use the html/template package to create a data-driven template that allows us to inject code at predefined places at runtime.

Templates are perfect in situations where we need to write files with some fixed content and we want to inject dynamic data at runtime. Go provides another template package called text/template, but we should use the html/template when writing HTML content. Both packages share a similar interface, so understanding one makes it easier to use the other.

Adding the html/template package

Let’s build an implementation that provides a hard-coded default template but also allows the user to specify their own alternate version using a ...