Awesome

Hamlet is a template language whose goal is to reduce HTML syntax to the essential parts.

Syntax

<body>
    <p>Some paragraph.
    <ul data-attr=list>
        <li>Item 1
        <li>Item 2

That Hamlet snippet is equivalent to:

<body>
  <p>Some paragraph.</p>
  <ul data-attr="list">
    <li>Item 1</li>
    <li>Item 2</li>
  </ul>
</body>

see, it is just HTML! Designers love Hamlet because it is just HTML! Closing tags are inferred from whitespace.

Details

You can see the original Haskell hamlet templating language and the [javascript port](hamlet: https://github.com/gregwebs/hamlet.js).

This Hamlet (ruby) works on top of slim. Please take a look at the slim documentation if you are looking to see if a more advanced feature is supported.

Difference with Slim

The most important difference is that hamlet always uses angle brackets. Hamlet also does not require attributes to be quoted - unquoted is considered a normal html attribute value and quotes will automatically be added. Hamlet also uses a '#' for code comments and the normal <!-- for HTML comments. Hamlet also uses different whitespace indicators - see the next section.

In Slim you have:

/! HTML comment
p data-attr="foo" Text
  | More Text
  / Comment

In hamlet you have:

<!-- HTML comment
<p data-attr=foo>Text
  More Text
  # Comment

Whitespace

Using indentation does have some consequences with respect to white space. This library is designed to do the right thing most of the time. This is a slightly different design from the original Haskell implementation of Hamlet and Slim, but the same design as hamlet.js

A closing tag is placed immediately after the tag contents. If you want to have a space before a closing tag, use a comment sign # on the line to indicate where the end of the line is.

<b>spaces  # 2 spaces are included

A new line is automatically added after tags with inner text. If you have multiple lines of inner text without tags (not a common use case) they will also get a new line added. If you do not want white space, you point it out with a > character, that you could think of as the end of the last tag, although you can still use it when separating content without tags onto different lines. You can also use a > if you want more than one space.

<b>spaces  # 2 spaces are included

<b>spaces  </b>

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

<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. This rails plugin works out of the box.

Limitations

A space is not automatically added after a tag when looping through an array Double quotes in attributes will get messed up: click=do('ok!') not click=do("whoops!")

Development

Run tests with

bundle exec rake test

bundle exec ruby -r ./test/slim/helper.rb TEST

There are some failing tests that are skipped right now