That is not the reason why it has the reputation of being weak at inline markup: this is the exact reason why people consider it to be weak at inline markup: it

That is not the reason why it has the reputation of being weak at inline markup: this is the exact reason why people consider it to be weak at inline markup: it doesn't support inline markup at all. However, I fail to see why that's a problem. HAML is an abstraction that explicitly acknowledged it is leaky. It just doesn't support inline markup; you'll have to fallback to html to get, just like you have to fallback to assembler from C or JNI from Java to be able to do certain things. I say that's a good thing. Draw a clear line.