Hey fans of everything concise. My finding of today is Haml and Sass which is a quickly growing replacement for Rhtml (and plain HTML) and CSS. Just check the syntax sample on their main page and admit it, it’s much simpler and cleaner than plain (R)HTML. Everything has a meaning, everything cuts to chase.

Haml can be used with Ruby on Rails as a plug-in that transparently adds the support to your ActiveViews. You simply rename your views from .rhtml to .haml and start deleting redundant code. In case of CSS, you place your .sass in the stylesheets folder and they are automatically compiled on demand. One thing I haven’t figured out yet is whether they do every time, or once per change to save performance.

Haml and Sass are also used in the StaticMatic toolkit, which is exactly how I discovered them. The toolkit lets you put together static sites lighting fast. You simply write your pages in Haml, model your stylesheets in Sass, preview and do a final build. As the result of building you get a bunch of little cute HTML files and CSS stylesheets ready for upload to the site. If you, like me, still like static sites and want to save time on bringing them up and maintaining, it’s your choice.

Let me know what you think. A couple of lines is fine.