Re: [web-devel] [hamlet] implicit spaces with newlines?

I think what the original author was saying was that when you make a new line with html, whitespace is inserted, not whether hamlet should automatically insert space after every tag. So yes, writing <p>hello<strong>there</strong></p> should not put white spacing. But when you write, in html: <p>hello <strong>there</strong></p> It is equivalent to <p>hello <strong>there</strong></p> (note the space). On May 19, 2011, at 11:57 PM, Michael Snoyman wrote:

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 11:49 PM, Patrick Palka wrote:

...

I find it a bit unintuitive that the hamlet code

<p>hello <strong>there

or

<p> hello <strong>there

generates the html

<p>hello<strong>there</strong></p>

I expected there to be a space between "hello" and "there" similar to what the html specifications dictate. Is this behavior intentional or an oversight? If it's the former, then what is the recommended way to simulate my expected behavior? Appending a space to the end of a line is mentally ugly and syntactically obscure.

I'm not sure what you mean by "what the html specifications dictate." HTML is whitespace-sensitive, meaning that:

<i>foo</i> <b>bar</b>

and

<i>foo</i><b>bar</b>

Are different. Now, in all likelihood in the above example, you will want to have the whitespace surrounding tags. But consider the following HTML:

<p>You are logged in as <i>Michael Snoyman</i>, <a href="/logout">logout</a>.</p><p>Another paragraph.</p>

In the case of the <i> and <a> tags, we definitely do *not* want to add whitespace after the tag (though we do want it before the tag). In the case of <p>, we don't care one way or another, but adding the whitespace everywhere will take up (a trivial amount of) extra bandwidth. tl;dr: Sometimes you don't want the whitespace.

So when designing Hamlet, I thought up a few possibilities:

1) What we do now: all whitespace must be explicit. 2) Implicitly add whitespace before/after every tag. 3) Do something "smart", adding whitespace where it's desired.

(2) isn't really an option because it makes having a tag as the last word in a sentence impossible. (3) gives me the creeps: I like smart libraries, but I will *never* trust a library to do this kind of stuff correctly all the time, even if I'm the one making up the rules for it to follow! And I have no doubt that it will quickly devolve into 500 lines of hairy code to try and cover millions of corner cases. Oh, and don't forget that there are other languages than English that might approach it differently.

I suppose another possibility is (2) along with some special way of forcing the removal of extra whitespace, but this seemed much less intuitive than the current approach.

Anyway, that's the reasoning behind this stuff, if people have better ideas, I'd like to hear them.

Michael

_______________________________________________ web-devel mailing list web-devel@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/web-devel