Haml (HTML Abstraction Markup Language) is a templating system that is designed to avoid writing inline code in a web document and make the HTML cleaner. Similar to other template systems like eRuby, Haml also embeds some code that gets executed during runtime and generates HTML code in order to provide some dynamic content. In order to run Haml code, files need to have a .haml extension. These files are similar to .erb or .eRuby files, which also help embed Ruby code while developing a web application. While parsing code comments, Haml uses the same rules as Ruby 1.9 or later. Haml understands only ASCII-compatible encodings, like UTF-8, but not UTF-16, or UTF-32, because these are not compatible with ASCII. Haml can be used at the command line, as a separate Ruby module, or in a Ruby on Rails application.

History

Haml was originally introduced by Hampton Catlin with its initial release in 2006 and his work was taken up by a few other people. His motive was to make HTML simpler, cleaner, and easier to use. Since 2006, it has been revised several times, and newer versions have been released. Until 2012, Natalie Weizenbaum was the primary maintainer of Haml, followed by Norman Clarke until 2015. Natalie worked on making Haml usable in Ruby applications, while the branding and design were done by Nick Walsh. Version 2.2.0 was released in July 2009 with support for Ruby 1.9 and Rails 2.0 or above. Version 3.0.0 was released in May 2010, adding support for Rails 3 and some performance improvements. The fourth major version broke compatibility with previous versions, only supporting Rails 3 and Ruby 1.8.7 or above, and marked the switch to semantic versioning. Several amendments like increasing the performance, fixing a few warnings, compatibility with latest versions of Rails, fixes in the documentation, and many more were made in the Haml 4 series. Version 5.0.0 was released in April 2017. It supports Ruby 2.0.0 or above and drops compatibility with Rails 3. A 'trace' option, which helps users to perform tracing on Haml template, has been added.

Examples

Haml markup is similar to CSS in syntax. For example, Haml has the same dot representation for classes as CSS does.

"Hello, World!"

Haml as a command-line tool

The following are equivalent as HAML recognises CSS selectors: These render to the following HTML code:

Haml as an add-on for Ruby on Rails

Haml can be integrated into Ruby on Rails as a plugin. Similar to eRuby, Haml also can access local variables (declared within same file in Ruby code). This example uses a sample Ruby controller file. This renders to:

Haml as a Ruby module

Haml is also capable of being used independently as a Ruby library. Output: Haml::Engine is a Haml class.

Basic example

Haml uses whitespace indentation (two spaces) for tag nesting and scope, replacing open-end tag pairs. The following example compares the syntaxes of Haml and eRuby (Embedded Ruby), alongside the HTML output. Key differences are:

Example with embedded Ruby code

The above Haml would produce this XHTML:

Implementations

The official implementation of Haml has been built for Ruby with plugins for Ruby on Rails and Merb, but the Ruby implementation also functions independently. Haml can be easily used along with other languages. Below is a list of languages in which Haml has implementations: