"I'm using shpaml with django it's just great. I've been telling everyone I can about the glory of significant whitespace, and not having to worry about closing tags. Thanks!" -- Jim Robert

SHPAML is a mini language that can help you to build web pages more quickly. It leverages familiar concepts from HTML and CSS, while striving to bring brevity and clarity to the primary documents that you edit. It plays nice with templating languages.

This website introduces a free public-domain software implementation of SHPAML in Javascript and Python.

SHPAML allows you to produce HTML with cleaner syntax, without introducing any other layer of abstraction. It does so in the following ways:

  1. Reduce punctuation
  2. Reduce the need for end tags
  3. Mimic CSS selector syntax
  4. Allow well-formed HTML to pass through
  5. Play nice with templating languages

Try the Tutorial to learn more.

Where it fits on the stack

This diagram may help you understand where SHPAML would fit in the stack (in terms of translation).

  • SHPAML (preprocess)
  • Templating language (render w/any language)
  • HAML/ERB (render w/Ruby)
  • Builder, wiki, markdown
  • jQuery
  • Javascript
  • HTML
  • DOM objects