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 hamlet templating langauge and the javascript port.

This Hamlet 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 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

I added the same syntax that hamlet.js uses to indicate whitespace: a closing bracket to the left and a code comment to the right. I will probably take out some of the slim white space techniques.

<p>   White space to the left        # and to the right
  >   White space to the left again# None to the right

Limitations

I just hacked this up the other day - let me know if there are any issues. After some more experience using Slim's syntax I plan on trying to reduce the total available syntax.

Development

Run tests with

rake test

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