%sandwich{bread: ‘whole wheat’, filling: ‘peanut butter and jelly’,
delicious: true}

And most text editors / IDEs highlight the indentation you are in, so there is no need to have a closing tag.

And HAML precompiles to ERB.

Your post begs the question on what is a better way to template. Seeing that you have been working on HandlebarJS for a while, why don’t you also include other posts where you describe how to use it together with your technical justification? If you don’t have that, I would love to read that future entry.

But instead, I decided to not just complain but do something about it, so I wrote something that worked the way I do like, which is what turned out to be the HandlebarJS templating engine. I can say pretty surely that writing HTML templates with JSON data and minimal templating logic is the way I think templating should be, so I consider HAML to be an inferior option in most ways.

But I do appreciate your perspective and comments — keep ‘em coming!

That’s odd that HAML tells you to define a hash in the documentation, but maybe they are just trying to illustrate how this can be done, which I guess could be incredibly useful if, say, you have a long succession of HTML values that you need to repeatedly pass the same attributes to.

Anyway, documentation is never the strong suit of anything in the ruby/rails world.

How long did you try HAML before decided you didn’t like it? I am not trying to be a jerk, I’m just curious because I did say all of these same things until I forced myself to try it again — it was the extreme frustration of
horribly ugly ERB code, cluttered up with everywhere, and all those useless tags — that made me give it another shot. And it only took me, I dunno, two hours or so — before I became somewhat evangelical about it. (And I’m not really particularly evangelical about anything!)