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Overview

herml is an Erlang port of Haml. It intends to appropriate the primary features of Haml while adhering to Erlang conventions where appropriate. What is taken from Haml:

• Space-sensitivity – using 2 spaces for nesting of tags and blocks
• ID and class shortcuts for elements
• DOCTYPE shortcuts
• Trailing slash (/) for singleton “self-closed” tags
• Some default helpers, including html_attrs and escape_once

Where Erlang conventions are applied:

• Tag attributes are expressed as proplists
• Iteration is done with a list-comprehension-like syntax

Ways in which herml is different:

• Emitting variables from the environment or calling helper functions is done by preceding the variable or function with “@”.
• Since the template cannot have instance variables in the same sense as Haml, function calls preceded with @@ will receive the current environment proplist as the last argument.

We also take the stand that templates should be accompanied by a rich set of helpers to reduce the amount of code in the template. As such we do not intend to allow nested function calls.