Haml

19 Dec 2010 UI, Web, web development, Haml, HTML, Markup

Haml is a markup language for generating xml and other markup - most popularly HTML. Over the past few weeks I have been writing a few Ruby on Rails applications and chose Haml as the templating language. For someone who has traditionally avoided positional languages this was a strange choice. Having written a few simple applications I find that the writing HTML in Haml is both straightforward and intuitive. Good HTML is naturally hierarchical and having this structure both encouraged and enforced in Haml feels right.

Haml is a markup language for generating xml and other markup - most popularly HTML. Over the past few weeks I have been writing a few Ruby on Rails applications and chose Haml as the templating language. For someone who has traditionally avoided positional languages this was a strange choice. Having written a few simple applications I find that the writing HTML in Haml is both straightforward and intuitive. Good HTML is naturally hierarchical and having this structure both encouraged and enforced in Haml feels right.

Generating

#some-id.someclass

is one of the great things about haml

Produces

<div id='some-id' class='someclass'></div>

There are definitely some quirks. Sometimes I have to switch styles or div tags and in some cases declare them explicitly with a %div. These cases are generally when generating html in iterators and not a big deal. %script tags, in line with the rest of Haml, can’t have additional indentation - which encourages me to take this content and push it into included JavaScript files, something that I think is good practice anyway.