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Since my initial post outlining daml as a haml-for-python, a lot has changed. Now it has become something more and plays a new role in a bigger project I am working on. Let’s look at some of the new syntax changes.

CSS Selector Style Attributes

Declaring attributes now follows css selectors appended to a tag hash. For example,

%html %body #content.main[attr=val][apples=yes] some content

Inlining Tag Hashes

One can now inline tag hashes. The functionality is still being worked on and is broken beyond a single tier. The intent is to handle use cases such as,

%html %body %ul#nav %li %a[href=/] Home %li %a[href=/contact] Contact #wrapper #container #top #content

Implicit Python Declaration

Since my last post, all python code had to be preceded with a colon (:). Now, this is only necessary when embedding a function call in plain text (or calling a filter). For Example,

def greet(s): return 'Hello, {0}.'.format(s) nav = ['www', 'www2', 'www3'] %html %body %p A greeting for you. :greet('Daniel') %ul for x in nav: %li {x}

The trade off to the above is explicit line breaks for multiline text as similarly done in python,

%html %body This is some text \ that spans multiple \ lines.

I am still putting alot of thought into this portion of the syntax and it will most likely see some changes in a number of months. Explicit line breaks can become rather confusing when handling complex mixed contents, but again, tools such as daml aren’t particularly suited for writing page content, but rather establishing layout.

New Filters

I added two new filters as a test, these may be removed in future releases (and migrated to my personal set of daml extensions). They are for declaring css and js files. I think the syntax speaks for itself in function,

%html %head :css /css/ main.css extra.css lib/that_lib.css :js /js/lib/ utils.js js.js jquery.min.js etc.js %body %h1 I do enjoy filters!

I think such filters could be upgraded to support appending additional files, but again, I dont really have a place for such things that aren’t a necessity to a fully featured template engine.

In Summary

This release requires cython >= 0.13 and lxml. I use this regularly on Windows 7 x64 and linux. The 0.1.4 release can be found on pypi, http://pypi.python.org/pypi/dmsl/0.2 and you can follow development at github, https://github.com/dasacc22/dmsl