Preloading a textarea with whitespace-sensitive content is not terribly common. But the point is that no matter the degree of its commonness, it's a special case, and handling special cases is something that shouldn't be done by default. It's inefficient, leads to feature bloat, could make for nasty surprises, and causes the documentation to get very tangled very quickly.
"~" is more obscure than "%" or "-" because it's not commonly used. The largest number of questions I heard about Haml when it was first released were, "I get =, but what does ~ do?" For a long time we've been getting people saying "My whitespace doesn't work!" Even though this command is fully documented in the reference, people didn't know it existed. The difference between "%" and "-" is that both of those are fundamental to the functionality of Haml... "~" was not. By changing it to find_and_preserve, we've done two things. First, we've linked it into the existing Helper functionality, which is (hopefully) a place people look for solutions to these problems. Second, we've made the name very descriptive, unlike "~", which doesn't convey any meaning at all. - Nathan Jeff wrote: > Nathan, > > IMHO, textarea is not a "case that doesn't come up at all for most > people". It comes up for everyone who creates a form. > > Ross argues for maintaining the integrity of haml the template > langauge. When I suggested special behavior for textarea and pre, I > was arguing for maintaining the integrity of the markup that haml > produces. > > I love haml and I can live with the deprecation, but I don't buy the > arguments. ~ is no more obscure than %, - or find_and_preserve. > > -- Jeff --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Haml" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/haml?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
