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

[Michael Snoyman]

That makes sense, thanks for that clarification. But the newline
already has a different meaning in Hamlet, so we can't really assign
it the same semantics as HTML's newline.

Michael

On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 6:12 PM, Daniel Patterson
<lists.haskell at dbp.mm.st> wrote:
> 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 <patrick at parcs.ath.cx> 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
>>
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>
>