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Zen Coding

Posted by kdawson on from the change-your-life dept.

Download Squad has a quick review, with video, of Zen Coding (Google Code project page here), an extremely well-thought-out accelerator for anyone who codes HTML. Its syntax is CSS-like. Zen Coding has been around for a while — here's its author Sergey Chikuyonok's introduction in Smashing Magazine from last November — and it has now picked up support for more than a dozen editing environments, including Notepad++ and TextMate.

10 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. Zen by mindbrane · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is there a better commentary on the west's general inability to grok zen than our endless bastardization of the word, zen?

    --
    ideopath @ play
  2. Let's see... by oljanx · · Score: 4, Insightful

    When I "write HTML" I'm actually writing HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and SQL queries at the same time. On a good day. What the hell, why not add another syntax?

    1. Re:Let's see... by pavera · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Please keep your SQL and HTML separate. Don't punish those who will come after you.

    2. Re:Let's see... by EvanED · · Score: 3, Insightful

      What the hell, why not add another syntax?

      To be fair, the syntax is very much like CSS. Further, it's not like it stays in the file for those who come after; it's just that the editor expands things for you.

    3. Re:Let's see... by EvanED · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So it's kind of like Lisp macros, except that they are expanded in the source to make maintenance both more difficult and less efficient than just starting over from scratch.

      If that's your attitude, feel free to go ahead and use Markdown or ASCIIDoc or one of the other markup lanugages that you can compile to HTML.

      However, this is something you can use in documents that are already HTML, need to be HTML because that's what your employer or customer demands, etc. without affecting the end result. Saying "let's replace HTML with something better" is not exactly a realistic proposition.

  3. Not sheer genius by MichaelSmith · · Score: 4, Insightful

    TFA shows how Zen lets you type in a terse message and have it expanded into a chunk of html code and describes it as sheer genius. Thats neat but I have nedit macros which do pretty much the same thing. They are time savers for sure.

    But nothing which you couldn't do a thousand ways. With perl, awk or sed.

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    http://michaelsmith.id.au
  4. Re:don't mock the Notepad++ by EvanED · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yeah, god forbid someone pay money for software they use and like.

  5. Accelerator by neoform · · Score: 4, Insightful

    an extremely well thought-out accelerator for anyone who codes HTML.

    I don't think that word means what you think it means.

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    MABASPLOOM!
  6. You don't "code" HTML by Viol8 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You code in java,C++,javascript, but HTML is a formatting language - you do not code in it because it isn't a coding language. I know it makes fluffy web page designers feel like their playing with the big boys to talk about "coding" in HTML but you might was well talk about "coding" .ini files.

  7. Re:don't mock the Notepad++ by bit01 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yeah, god forbid someone pay money for software they use and like.

    The price and license are important software characteristics whether you like it or not. A non-zero price can make it a practical impossibility to use in many organizations because of the paperwork involved. A license that doesn't allow you to install it where ever you need it, as you need it can also be a problem.

    Since their are many free alternatives available in this category it's easily possible that the pay software is more trouble than it's worth even if it is otherwise superior, as the GPP was implicitly pointing out.

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    Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.