3 ms·

Good luck giving that to a designer.

by zaius 17y ago

tptacek 17y ago
This comes up every time people talk about Haml. It's a red herring. You're crazy if you ask your designer to work in Haml. There are few enough excellent designers to begin with; consider yourself lucky to get semantic markup out of them, let alone Haml and Sass. On every professional project I've worked with, we were given markup and assets from designers, and then expected to integrate them ourselves. If you're lucky enough to have a designer on staff, train them in Sass. Otherwise, the process of converting HTML to Haml and CSS to Sass isn't any harder than converting mockup HTML to templates. On the opposite side, if you just need a refresh or a facelift, you give them the HTML and CSS that Haml and Sass generate. It's nicer looking than ad hoc markup already.
- grandalf 17y ago
  This is the key point. You save time working with Haml and Sass if your designers can use them, edit them, etc. I am longing to get to a point where the designers I work with can be expected to write templates using mustache or django template language... Ideally the designer can check out a submodule of the project and commit ongoing UI enhancements by simply modifying mustache/django templates that they wrote in the first place. This could easily be implemented by using a static site generator to populate the templates with static data so that the designer could check his/her work before committing. With Haml you end up translating the whole mess over and over again, and if you decide to make a big change to HTML/CSS you are spending lots of time redoing the HAML/Sass. The other key thing to realize is that CSS is an extremely expressive spec when used properly I really don't think that the small bit of conciseness offered by Sass is worth adding another layer...
  - nex3 17y ago
    CSS, although a very cool and powerful language, leaves a lot to be desired in one key area: abstraction. Not coincidentally, this is the area that Sass is best at. Chris Eppstein has an excellent blog post (http://chriseppstein.github.com/blog/2009/09/20/why-stylesheet-abstraction-matters/ http://chriseppstein.github.com/blog/2009/09/20/why-styleshe...) explaining why abstraction in stylesheets matters.
    - grandalf 17y ago
      Interesting. Thanks for the link, I will check out Compass. I think the widgets/plugins are really an awesome idea.
nex3 17y ago
I agree with tptacek that this is a red herring, but I disagree about why. Maybe I've been lucky, but all the designers I've interacted with are plenty good enough to get Haml and (especially) Sass. And most of these designers have liked them. The semantics of Haml and Sass are identical to those of HTML and CSS. The extensions they add are generally clear to anyone familiar with the base languages. And Haml has the great benefit of making HTML be written like CSS, which is much more comfortable to designers.

Good luck giving that to a designer.

by zaius 17y ago

Good luck giving that to a designer.

This comes up every time people talk about Haml. It's a red herring. You're crazy if you ask your designer to work in Haml. There are few enough excellent designers to begin with; consider yourself lucky to get semantic markup out of them, let alone Haml and Sass. On every professional project I've worked with, we were given markup and assets from designers, and then expected to integrate them ourselves. If you're lucky enough to have a designer on staff, train them in Sass. Otherwise, the process of converting HTML to Haml and CSS to Sass isn't any harder than converting mockup HTML to templates. On the opposite side, if you just need a refresh or a facelift, you give them the HTML and CSS that Haml and Sass generate. It's nicer looking than ad hoc markup already.

grandalf 17y ago
This is the key point. You save time working with Haml and Sass if your designers can use them, edit them, etc. I am longing to get to a point where the designers I work with can be expected to write templates using mustache or django template language... Ideally the designer can check out a submodule of the project and commit ongoing UI enhancements by simply modifying mustache/django templates that they wrote in the first place. This could easily be implemented by using a static site generator to populate the templates with static data so that the designer could check his/her work before committing. With Haml you end up translating the whole mess over and over again, and if you decide to make a big change to HTML/CSS you are spending lots of time redoing the HAML/Sass. The other key thing to realize is that CSS is an extremely expressive spec when used properly I really don't think that the small bit of conciseness offered by Sass is worth adding another layer...
- nex3 17y ago
  CSS, although a very cool and powerful language, leaves a lot to be desired in one key area: abstraction. Not coincidentally, this is the area that Sass is best at. Chris Eppstein has an excellent blog post (http://chriseppstein.github.com/blog/2009/09/20/why-stylesheet-abstraction-matters/ http://chriseppstein.github.com/blog/2009/09/20/why-styleshe...) explaining why abstraction in stylesheets matters.
  - grandalf 17y ago
    Interesting. Thanks for the link, I will check out Compass. I think the widgets/plugins are really an awesome idea.

nex3 17y ago

I agree with tptacek that this is a red herring, but I disagree about why. Maybe I've been lucky, but all the designers I've interacted with are plenty good enough to get Haml and (especially) Sass. And most of these designers have liked them. The semantics of Haml and Sass are identical to those of HTML and CSS. The extensions they add are generally clear to anyone familiar with the base languages. And Haml has the great benefit of making HTML be written like CSS, which is much more comfortable to designers.