hamlet and #

[Bulat Ziganshin]

Hello yesodweb,

i'd rather easily converted my html files to hamlet format. the most
problematic thing both for conversion and probably further
maintenance was the handling of multiline contols - i mean than
something like

<p>text
text</p>

should be converted to

<p>text #
text

probably it was very motivated decision, but afair most html
templating systems i've learned don't require #'s, and for conversion
of typical, already structured html file it's the most time-consuming
and bug-prone part - the rest is just to remove all those </...> tags
and it's very fast and easy

so, the question is obvious - may be this decision need to be reversed?


--
Best regards,
Bulat mailto:Bulat.Z...@gmail.com

[Greg Weber]

I don't think the current haskell hamlet implementation has the most
natural defaults, but it is easy to explain what the rules are.
For my other implementations [1] it defaults to adding new lines or a
space and I rarely need to point out spacing to hamlet.

[1] https://github.com/gregwebs/hamlet.rb

[Michael Snoyman]

There are two things I was trying to avoid in designing the current setup:

* A bunch of special case rules about when to add whitespace. I like
the fact that we can explain things with one sentence: there's no
extra whitespace added.
* It's possible to express anything. If whitespace is *always* added,
it's impossible to use Hamlet tag syntax for, e.g. <i>Michael</i>'s
car.

But we can probably still hit both of those requirements if we (1)
switch the default to *always* adding whitespace after a tag and (2)
having some escape mechanism (e.g., a backslash at the end of the
line) to disable auto-whitespace.

Personally, I don't mind the current setup, but if people want to make
the change, I'm open to it. What's general consensus?

[Felipe Almeida Lessa]

I'd prefer using backslashes, but it would be a PITA to upgrade all templates by hand. Perhaps it would be sufficient to have a "transition knob" which printed a warning every time Hamlet assumed a space where it previously wouldn't (assuming that a tool to automagically upgrade would be too expensive to build).

--
Felipe – enviado do meu Galaxy Tab.

[Bulat Ziganshin]

Hello Greg,

Wednesday, June 13, 2012, 10:00:19 PM, you wrote:

> [1] https://github.com/gregwebs/hamlet.rb

btw, you forgot to close the last ``` html tag in README.rd:

``` html
<b>no space</b>none after bold. Two spaces after a period is bad!

## I18n support

You can hook up i18n support the same way you would for other templating lanugages.
[https://github.com/grosser/gettext_i18n_rails](This rails plugin) works out of the box.

[Bulat Ziganshin]

Hello Greg,

Wednesday, June 13, 2012, 10:00:19 PM, you wrote:

> [1] https://github.com/gregwebs/hamlet.rb

also this line has 2 broken links plus word "langauge"

You can see the [original hamlet templating langauge](http://www.yesodweb.com/book/templates) and the
[javascript port](hamlet: https://github.com/gregwebs/hamlet.js).

[Bulat Ziganshin]

Hello Michael,

Thursday, June 14, 2012, 8:11:13 AM, you wrote:

> There are two things I was trying to avoid in designing the current setup:

IMVHO, these rules looks like the good fit for quick&dirty proof-of-concept
implementation, but for long-running "production-grade" framework it has
the following disadvantages (repeating and extending myself):

- it's unexpected. at least, plain English, html and most templating
systems are doing opposite
- it makes (much?) harder to convert manually from html to hamlet.
automatic html2hamlet conversion tool generates unreadable hamlet
files, so i prefer to convert by hand. although now i think that it may
be solved by making smarter conversion tool
- it makes it harder to further maintain hamlet templates

so, i believe that it's the problem that's better to be solved earlier than
later, when hamlet will have larger userbase

> * A bunch of special case rules about when to add whitespace. I like
> the fact that we can explain things with one sentence: there's no
> extra whitespace added.

i think that the best thing is to copy existing rules either from html
or popular indent-based templating systems. whitespacing rules isn't
the field where users demand more diversity

> * It's possible to express anything. If whitespace is *always* added,
> it's impossible to use Hamlet tag syntax for, e.g. <i>Michael</i>'s
> car.

even without any special whitespacing rule, one can just explicitly close
the tag and continue text on the same line waiting till the next space