Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: [web-devel] statically compiled css

On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 12:28 PM, Benedict Eastaugh wrote:

On 6 August 2010 09:19, Michael Snoyman wrote:

...

After looking into sass a little bit, I've decided I like it ;). I see the following benefits of implementing something sass-like in Haskell via quasi-quotation:

* Compile-time guarantee of well-formedness. * The speed benefits of blaze-builder. Of course, this will still be slower than serving a static file. * Ability to use the same Haskell variables for both Hamlet and CSS.

I've started a new repo on Github[1]; I'm tentatively calling the project "stylish".

This sounds pretty interesting. I wrote a Ruby tool called Stylish [1] a couple of years ago to solve a similar set of problems, and have occasionally wondered about rewriting it in Haskell. I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

One potentially useful feature is generating code that requires browser prefixes (-webkit-border-radius etc.). There's also potential for generating minified versions of the code, concatenating multiple stylesheets etc.—it's a lot easier to do this stuff if you can programmatically manipulate the stylesheet at run-time. Embedding assets (graphics) as data URIs is another thing; have a look at how something like Jammit [3] does this.

As far as the border-radius kind of stuff: the approach I'm taking to mixins should make it possible to write a plain old Haskell function to output multiple border-radius statements. I might even include such a mixin in the main package.

Regarding concatenating stylesheets: I believe that would have to be handled at the level *above* Stylish; Yesod, for example, automatically concatenates all style statements added via the addStyle function. There's also a Firefox and Thunderbird extension [2] called Stylish.

Obviously you're free to call your project whatever you wish; I just thought I should let you know.

I'm open to naming suggestions. Here's a few other ideas I'd had:

* sasslet: I don't really like too much, but makes clear the connection to Hamlet and Sass. * csser/cssar: pronounced "Caesar," might give Shakespeare fans something to chuckle at. As it stands, I'm leaning fairly strongly towards including Stylish in the Hamlet package. Michael