hamlet

v0.3.3

Published

2 years ago

Hamlet template engine

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gregweber

Hamlet Html Templates for javascript

Hamlet is just html without redundancies. The big deal is that it uses your white space to automatically close tags. You already properly indent your tags right? Computers are supposed to automate things - lets have them close tags for us.

This is similar in concept to HAML or jade. However, HAML and jade abandons html syntax without justification. If we just apply significant white-space and a few other html-compatible shortcuts to regular HTML, we can get the benefit without the drawback. Designers that have used the Haskell version of Hamlet have really liked it.

I created this with client-side templates in mind, but it works server side with node.js

Syntax

<body>
    <p>Some paragraph.
    <ul>
        <li>Item 1
        <li>Item 2

That hamlet is equivalent to:

<body>
  <p>Some paragraph.</p>
  <ul>
    <li>Item 1</li>
    <li>Item 2</li>
  </ul>
</body>

Lets show some interpolation and CSS shortcuts:

<.foo>
  <span#bar data-attr=#{foo}>baz # this is a comment

That template invoked with: Hamlet(template, {foo:'f'}). generates:

<div class="foo"><span id="bar" data-attr="f">baz </span></div>

The library currently does not try to pretty print the resulting html, although it wouldn't be hard to do. Note the interpolation #{var}}. You can use other interpolation styles by changing the RegExp Hamlet.templateSettings.interpolate. You can put any javascript you would like in the interpolation.

Good error messages

Unlike Jade and many other templating options, Hamlet will tell you the line on which a javascript interpolation error occurred in your template. This does make it less powerful: read the next section.

Note that Hamlet will pretty much parse about anything and spit it out as HTML so there aren't parsing syntax errors to deal with. In practice there are very few syntax issues because you already know hamlet: it is just HTML!.

Important: hamlet.js does not have a construct for conditional html (an if statement)

Think of hamlet.js as your HTML pre-processor, but don't use it by itself to server 100% of your templating needs. hamlet.js works well when paired with something like AngularJS.

Good use cases for hamlet.js

server-side (nodejs) usage: a template language for client-heavy apps. hamlet.js is used to stick a few values in server side, but AngularJS is used for most actual logic client-side.
client-side usage: client heavy apps that use hamlet.js just as an html pre-processor. A client-side AngularJS template can be written more concisely and safely with hamlet.js. It is first expanded through hamlet.js
client-side usage: client light applications that just want to stick a few values into their client-side html, but don't need template logic.

Bad use cases

server-side (nodejs) usage: template langauge where all template logic is performed on the server
client-side usage: a client-heavy app where all logic is encoded in hamlet.js

interpolation

hamlet.js consists of the core hamlet language interspersed with javascript evaluation via #{js}. The only thing you can place in the javascript evaluation is something that produces a String. There is no way to have an if that may include some html if true.

hamlet.js is designed for client-heavy apps that are using something like AngularJs on the client-side. #{} is for simple server-side templating, and an angular user can still use {{}} for the client-side (although ng-bind is often a better choice)

One benefit of the limited js evaluation is that hamlet can recover very good error messages when used on the server side (by evaluating each line of the template one-by-one). Having conditionals (as jade does by default for example) ruins error message reporting because the entire template must be evaluated at once.

Overview

It is just HTML! But redundancies are taken away

quoting attributes is not required unless they have spaces
Indentation is used to automatically close tags.

This loosely follows the original Haskell Hamlet template language that I helped design. This implementation is simpler because it is invoked at runtime, just does a simple javascript eval, and has no concept of type insertion - this includes no html escaping. There is a fork of this library that uses Haskell Hamlet style interpolation.

Usage

This uses the same style and code as the template function from underscore.js

rendered_html = Hamlet(template, object)

pre_compiled_template = Hamlet(template)
rendered_html = pre_compiled_template(object)

Or you can avoid all variable assertion and just expand hamlet with:

Hamlet.toHtml('<p>') // "<p></p>"

nodejs

var hamlet = require('hamlet').hamlet

hamlet('<p>') // "<p></p>"

There is also a command line program bin/hamlet.js. It is not listed in package.json due to some weird install issues. Similarly, the dependencies for that program are listed in the devDependencies.

Meteor

There is an atmosphere package.

Express

It should work with the '.hamlet' extension.

Layouts

This uses the filesystem so it only works for nodejs. Just add layout path/to/layout at the very top of your template. In your layout file, use the special content variable #{content} to include the inner template content.

Since Hamlet is designed for client-heavy usage there are no plans to support partials directly.

You can of course manually create layouts or partials by first rendering an inner template and setting that as a local variable in the outer template.

class/id shortcuts

The CSS-based shortcuts are originally taken from the HAML markup language. A '#' indicates an id, and a '.' indicates a class. You can add as many classes this way as you like.

Comments

Comments begin with a '#' character. When the template is compiled they are removed, not converted to html comments. There is no support for html comments.

White space

Using indentation does have some consequences with respect to white space. This library is designed to just do the right thing most of the time. This is a slightly different design from the original Haskell implementation of Hamlet.

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

<b>spaces  </b>

White space 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 space 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.

<p>
  <b>no space
  >none here either.
  >  Two spaces after a period is bad, just use one!

<p><b>no space</b>none here either.  Two spaces after a period is bad, just use one!</p>

Closing bracket

currently the '>' character is optional if there is no inner text on the same line. In the future this will be changed to be required so that tag attributes can span multiple lines.

Limitations

Hamlet just uses a simple eval interpolation. This works well for me on an AngularJS project where AngularJS is actually doing the templating. You might be able to use Hamlet to pre-process for another templating system.

Development

Requires Coffeescript, although if you are only comfortable changing js I can easily port it to the Coffeescript file.

Testing

The test suite is pretty good now. I create a regression test for every issue I notice.

npm test

You can run the tests in a browser by opening test/test.html and looking at the console.

Test cases can be ported from the Haskell Hamlet test suite

Converting from jade

If there are no variables interpreted in your jade, you can compile it down to html

> jade.compile('test(attr="val") text', {debug:false, compileDebug:false, pretty:true, client:true})()
'\n<test a="val">wtf</test>'

TODO: If there are variables, is there a way to set every variable value to #{variable} ?

Converting from html

One of the great things about Hamlet is that for a small amount of HTML, you can just delete the closing tags.

There is a Haskell tool html2hamlet (install Haskell, then cabal install html2hamlet)

❯ echo '\n<test a="val">text</test>' | ./cabal-dev/bin/html2hamlet
!!!
<test a="val">
  text

Thanks

I wrote the parser code, but the template insertion is stolen from micro-template and express integration from jade.