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Don’t Make Me Write HTML

linux-mag.com

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Re: Don’t Make Me Write HTML

#31

Post by dasil003 »

hboon wrote: post #15
endtwist wrote: post #7

Oh please. The time you spend learning HAML or Markdown (and all their potential intricacies) could be better spent learning to write clean HTML. I'm sure that both of those "alternatives" have their own quirks that must be worked around, not to mention the fact that you don't know exactly what HTML the parsers will spit out (yes, you can learn the output, I suppose, but why?). I can see these tools being useful in c…

Markdown is for writing content. Content creators shouldn't need to write their content (blogs, news, whatever) in HTML. Markdown is for that and only that.

I also like it for readmes on github, FWIW.

Re: Don’t Make Me Write HTML

#32

Post by dasil003 »

derefr wrote: post #10
endtwist wrote: post #7

Oh please. The time you spend learning HAML or Markdown (and all their potential intricacies) could be better spent learning to write clean HTML. I'm sure that both of those "alternatives" have their own quirks that must be worked around, not to mention the fact that you don't know exactly what HTML the parsers will spit out (yes, you can learn the output, I suppose, but why?). I can see these tools being useful in c…

I would agree with you if you were talking simply about Markdown, but it seems you don't understand the point of HAML. Markdown is a complex syntax that loosely translates to half of HTML. It's good for user-input, because it's designed to be written like users already write stylistic formatting when the result will be plain ASCII, but it's not HTML. HAML is HTML—it's a one-to-one conversion—but it's simpler and more…

"it's a one-to-one conversion"

are you absolutely sure about that? No edge cases around the whitespace?

"it's like looking at machine language instead of assembler."

That would only be true if HTML tags were specified by number.

"They're equivalent, so why read it the painful way?"

HAML is more readable only in the sense that it forces a certain indentation structure on you. If you are working with well-formatted HTML than there is not much benefit there. Overall, when HTML gets deeply nested, I'd rather see the ending tag.

As far as writing is concerned, yeah, HAML is a big win if you don't know how to use your editor. I solved that problem 10 years ago and I didn't have to switch to an format no one understands to do it. Let me put it this way:

If HAML had the same tooling support as HTML, and if other people were as likely to understand it, and if it didn't require a compilation step, then the benefits of HAML would be clearcut. As it stands, HAML just doesn't offer anything compelling to me (SASS comes closer).

Re: Don’t Make Me Write HTML

#33

Post by hboon »

dasil003 wrote: post #31
hboon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Markdown is for writing content. Content creators shouldn't need to write their content (blogs, news, whatever) in HTML. Markdown is for that and only that.

I also like it for readmes on github, FWIW.

Right. Any (those I can think of at least) type of content that doesn't require specialized formatting (math symbols, etc) like READMEs, blogs, journals, CMS content, etc.

Re: Don’t Make Me Write HTML

#36

Post by twopoint718 »

Lately, I've been using Pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) which is a better markdown than markdown (uses a parser rather than regexes). It also knows how to convert between lots of different markups it can read LaTeX, HTML, reStructuredText and markdown. It can write that and many more. I use it to convert LaTeX into S5 presentations and HTML; very nice for giving talks.
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