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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.

13 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
    1. Re:Zen by istartedi · · Score: 5, Funny

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

      ZEN is not a ticker symbol on the NYSE yet, so I guess not.

      --
      For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  2. Re:Vim? by vroom · · Score: 5, Informative
    The official page doesn't mention vim support, but this script seems to match the functionality pretty closely http://mattn.github.com/zencoding-vim/

    Check the TUTORIAL file in the repo to either turn on by filetype or globally

  3. Re:The lesser known Zen Coding koans by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    I prefer my koans with ice cream.

  4. 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 eelke_klein · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Maybe you should make that, please keep your SQL, PHP, JavaScript, CSS and HTML seperate.

  5. 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.

    --
    http://michaelsmith.id.au
  6. I nominate this for all-time... by bcrowell · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...crappiest article ever to get frontpaged on slashdot.

    It's a couple hundred words worth of "OMG!" with a code example.

    --
    Find free books.
    1. Re:I nominate this for all-time... by greg1104 · · Score: 5, Funny

      You should save your vote for when its dupe shows up in a couple of days.

  7. 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.

    --
    MABASPLOOM!
  8. The master told me by goombah99 · · Score: 4, Funny

    The master told me to mediate on the sound of one parenthesis closing. I am ashamed that I don't know what this means. Or was that his point.

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
  9. 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.