"One innovation: you don't write HTML. You tell Seaside what HTML you want, and it does all the dirty work."
I'm sorry. I really think it is legitimate to dismiss Haml out of hand. The ideal framework writes everything for me but the html. If there is one think about the web that works, it is html. HTML is the first markup language used widely by non-programmers. You can come up with whatever argument you want for its undesirability but its like trying to fight the need for a qwerty keyboard in a PDA.
Not only is Html a great, proven, standard language for representing rich text on a page, it is a language that even your customers can understand (not to mention your web designer..). I'm sure someone once came out with a great, non-ascii word processor...
HTML is nothing more than a syntax that represents a tree of nodes with attributes, that's it, and there are other syntaxes that can also represent that same structure just as good.
When you have a language who's syntax is directly capable of representing that structure natively, it's a huge programmatic boon to simply write the markup directly in the host language.
In Seaside for example, since HTML is written in Smalltalk directly, I can use all of Smalltalk's automated refactoring tools on it, extracting methods, renaming things, pushing methods up and down the class hierarchy, etc. You can slice and dice pages in a way not possible with text files.
This is a huge advantage over raw HTML templates for the programmer. Seaside firmly insists that the programmer, not the designer, should be generating the proper markup; the designer has CSS. If this fits your work style, or if you're both the designer and the programmer, this style will benefit you and is much more enjoyable that raw HTML.
> When you have a language who's syntax is directly capable of representing that structure natively, it's a huge programmatic boon to simply write the markup directly in the host language.
IFF the other people you have to collaborate with, such as designers, artists, new programmers, etc... are all fluent in that language. That's a big 'if' in my opinion. I can hand someone a Rails template file, and they can hack at it even if they don't know Ruby.
It's not a big if at all, representing a tree of nodes with attributes in an alternate syntax doesn't change the semantics of the markup. If they know HTML, they can learn an alternate markup style in minutes, it ain't rocket science.
I'm sorry. I really think it is legitimate to dismiss Haml out of hand. The ideal framework writes everything for me but the html. If there is one think about the web that works, it is html. HTML is the first markup language used widely by non-programmers. You can come up with whatever argument you want for its undesirability but its like trying to fight the need for a qwerty keyboard in a PDA.
Not only is Html a great, proven, standard language for representing rich text on a page, it is a language that even your customers can understand (not to mention your web designer..). I'm sure someone once came out with a great, non-ascii word processor...