Haml is HTML abstraction markup language. In other words, it’s a language you can use instead of HTML to create HTML files. It’s designed to make markup simple, easy to write, clean, readable, and adhering to the DRY principles.
Haml is easy to learn and is well documented. It saves your time because there are 30-40 percent less characters in Haml code than in ERB and you don’t have to write closing tags. This makes it incredibly easy to nest elements and declare the div tags. It emphasizes using semantic tags because there is so much less markup.
Haml has been created by Hampton Catlin in May 2006, and then maintained and developed by Nathan Weizenbaum for many years. The official implementation has been built for Ruby with plugins for Ruby on Rails. There are also implementations for other languages (Python, PHP, Perl, Java, and more).
You can also use Haml on a project independent of Ruby, by installing the Haml gem on your machine and using the command line to convert it to html.
Here’s a sample haml file:
!!! %html{ :xmlns => "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml", :lang => "en", "xml:lang" => "en"} %head %title BoBlog %meta{"http-equiv" => "Content-Type", :content => "text/html; charset=utf-8"} %link{"rel" => "stylesheet", "href" => "main.css", "type" => "text/css"} %body #header %h1 BoBlog %h2 Bob's Blog #content - @entries.each do |entry| .entry %h3.title= entry.title %p.date= entry.posted.strftime("%A, %B %d, %Y") %p.body= entry.body #footer %p All content copyright © Bob
The above haml file generates this XHTML:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html lang='en' xml:lang='en' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'> <head> <title>BoBlog</title> <meta content='text/html; charset=utf-8' http-equiv='Content-Type' /> <link href="/stylesheets/main.css" media="screen" rel="Stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <div id='header'> <h1>BoBlog</h1> <h2>Bob's Blog</h2> </div> <div id='content'> <div class='entry'> <h3 class='title'>Halloween</h3> <p class='date'>Tuesday, October 31, 2006</p> <p class='body'> Happy Halloween, glorious readers! I'm going to a party this evening... I'm very excited. </p> </div> <div class='entry'> <h3 class='title'>New Rails Templating Engine</h3> <p class='date'>Friday, August 11, 2006</p> <p class='body'> There's a very cool new Templating Engine out for Ruby on Rails. It's called Haml. </p> </div> </div> <div id='footer'> <p> All content copyright © Bob </p> </div> </body> </html>
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