HAML/SASS and tenplate building clean semantic sites for less.

The players. POSH Typographical Baseline Grid Layout Grid HAML/SASS tenplate

POSH POSH encapsulates the best practices of using semantic HTML to author web pages.semantic HTML isn't there a tag for that? semantic classes and id's no images for presentation

Before (markup w/ out posh) This is my headline this is a sub header this is a paragraph of content, it contains some bold text and some colored text. c this is a second paragraph

POSH (ahh, isn't that better) This is my headline this is a sub header this is a paragraph of content, it contains some bold text and some colored text. this is a second paragraph

POSH Check List The first rule of POSH is that you must validate your POSH.validate Second, drop the use of TABLEs for purely presentational purposes, spacer GIFs, and presentational-html in general.presentational-html Next, fix your Bed and BReakfast markup.Bed and BReakfast Eliminate Anorexic Anchors.Anorexic Anchors Use good semantic-class-names.semantic-class-names

Grids The grid system is an aid, not a guarantee. It permits a number of possible uses and each designer can look for a solution appropriate to his personal style. But one must learn how to use the grid; it is an art that requires practice. Josef Müller-Brockmann

Typographical Grid One of the things that separates good design from average design is baselines that line up. Web designers/developers have generally disregarded the baseline grid even though the necessary tools have been available for some time now.

A comparison of a page with arbitrary values with one that has considered vertical rhythm.

Em's Em's provide a relative alternative to px/pt, making your website scale gracefully to different font settings across browsers. By setting the pages overall font-size value to 62.5% in the body rule, text can be sized in ems using a value a tenth of the target pixel size. In other words, 1.0em equates to 10px, and 2.4em equates to 24px. Baseline grid is calculated by dividing the line-height by the font-size.

Layout Grids Grids are a template, a framework within which creativity can flourish. Too many designers spend time looking at a blank canvas, trying to figure out where elements should be positioned, but, if you have a flexible underlying grid, many such problems are already solved for you. It becomes obvious where and how elements should and can be positioned, thereby leaving you, the designer, with more time to work on graphic design and other page components. Instead of arbitrarily picking column sizes, grids enable you to create a common visual language throughout an entire Web site, rather than deciding things on a page-by-page basis. Components relate to each other, which makes it easier for users to scan content and develop familiarity with it.

Layout Grid

HAML Haml is the next step in generating views in your Rails application. Haml makes poorly nested markup a thing of the past. Your views are cleaner and look beautiful with haml. It's faster that erb's. What are you waiting for. Whitespace matters

Our old POSH This is my headline this is a sub header this is a paragraph of content, it contains some bold text and some colored text. this is a second paragraph

Now in HAML %h1 This is my headline %h2 this is a sub header %p this is a paragraph of content, it contains some %em bold text and some %span.highlight colored text. %p this is a second paragraph

ERB Welcome to our site! "sidebar" %>

HAML #content.left.column %h2 Welcome to our site! %p= print_information.right.column= render :partial => "sidebar"

SASS (syntactically awesome stylesheets) SASS is put quite simply an alternative way to write css. But in reality it is so much more. SASS provides: tabulation nested selectors constants mixins basic operations

CSS #main { width: 90%; } #main p { border-style: solid; border-width: 1px; border-color: #00f; } #main p a { text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; } #main p a:hover { text-decoration: underline; }

SASS #main :width 90% p :border-style solid :border-width 1px :border-color #00f a :text-decoration none :font-weight bold a:hover :text-decoration underline

Plus Constants !my_constant = # Basic operations !my_highlight = !my_constant+# Mixins =clearfix display: inline-block &:after content: "." display: block height: 0 clear: both visibility: hidden * html & height: 1px

tenplate variable typograpical grid variable layout grid forms POSH layout microformats - coming soon

Typographical grid !font_size = 1.4 h1 :font-size= !font_size+.6+"em" :margin= (!line_height/!font_size)+"em"

Layout grid Leverage mixins !width = 960 !grid_width = 960/10 =column_calc(!col_size)

Resources/Thanks Microformats.org Opera Developers blog. baseline-grid/ HAML/SASS Obtiva Tom Kersten