Emacs minor mode: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ZenCoding
Doesn't seem all that life-changing to me, but I guess it could speed you up if you churn out a lot of html every day.
If you code HTML, Zen Coding will change your life
11–20 of 44 posts
Re: If you code HTML, Zen Coding will change your life
#12The thing I don't like about all these ways to "improve" HTML/CSS is that they all seem to assume the rest of the webapp ecosystem doesn't exist. Take SASS's variables and arithmetic, for instance. I agree that CSS desperately needs some way to abstract out common values. But any decent webapp will already be using some sort of template system, and the template system will have some sort of variable. Why not use it a…
I feel similarly about all these HTML improvements (although i would love some CSS variable action like in SASS).
Almost any homepage I create that's not a one-shot throwaway for a client is going to running on top of some sort of framework. That means that for any table like this, I'm only going write a single row (at most), and then have my framework iterate over it and turn it into pretty code.
I love any time-saving or code-saving functions and features in my code as much as the next guy, but this seems like an unnecessary complication to already rather streamlined coding.
Also the fact that any IDE with decent auto-complete will be able to do the same thing with just three strokes instead of all that. (For example, in Eclipse if I type "<tab" then press enter, I get a fully formed pretty table in 5 key strokes.
Re: If you code HTML, Zen Coding will change your life
#13This plugin really shines in conjunction with your editor's power features. I use Zen Coding with the SublimeText editor's multiple and reflective selections.
Writing lengthy boilerplate code becomes trivially fast.
Re: If you code HTML, Zen Coding will change your life
#14Zen Coding seems like the Haml philosophy implemented as code completion rather than as a run time compiler. The upside is that the markup you generate is plain old HTML that any web framework can serve. The downside is that it has the readability of plain old HTML.
For me, its never been the initial coding of HTML that was the problem; there's always been plenty of text-editor solutions like auto-close and find-matching tags. Instead, the PITA of HTML is refactoring it and moving bits around, which is what Haml alleviates, but this does not.
Re: If you code HTML, Zen Coding will change your life
#15When i want to code HTML i use HTML.vim (for vim of course). Of course, you have to memorize some keystrokes such as ";bo" for bold. or ;fo for font or ";fc" for font color etc, but these are really easy.
I'd be interested in knowing if this is available for some OS X editor (pref a free one) and whether they have vim support. (Cant recall if TextWrangler is free)
Re: If you code HTML, Zen Coding will change your life
#16That's a seriously exaggerated title.
For very small values of change
Re: If you code HTML, Zen Coding will change your life
#17Zen Coding seems like the Haml philosophy implemented as code completion rather than as a run time compiler. The upside is that the markup you generate is plain old HTML that any web framework can serve. The downside is that it has the readability of plain old HTML.
Also, the point of HAML isn't just to make writing code faster, but to make it more maintainable as well. You lose that with Zen Coding.
Re: If you code HTML, Zen Coding will change your life
#18I find this odd. It's been awhile since I have done dedicated front-end work, maybe 5 years or so, but it was never writing this kind of code that was the real time suck, it was always making sure it worked in every browser that was the real problem.
Re: If you code HTML, Zen Coding will change your life
#19The thing I don't like about all these ways to "improve" HTML/CSS is that they all seem to assume the rest of the webapp ecosystem doesn't exist. Take SASS's variables and arithmetic, for instance. I agree that CSS desperately needs some way to abstract out common values. But any decent webapp will already be using some sort of template system, and the template system will have some sort of variable. Why not use it a…
I think there's a market for this in people who develop small brochure sites or for whipping up HTML comps. You have to start the template from something, no?
Re: If you code HTML, Zen Coding will change your life
#20Can it do html back to zen and then can I use it with erb/any other templating language? That would be useful.