abstractml VS Haml

That's your opinion, you are entitled to it and I respect that, but I have my own, which I am also entitled to, and when many languages exist that have done a similar thing (See HAML, Shpaml, and AbstractML), I see no problem with continuing with my opinion.

First of all, I like Slim. I like the beauty and cleanness of Slim templates, to me they are way more readable than regular ERB templates and I think they fit in the ruby/Rails ecosystem very well. Slim is a close cousin to Haml, without the ugly percent characters, haha. I've used Slim exclusively in my projects since about 2016.

> I can't say what problem it is supposed to solve

"Haml accelerates and simplifies template creation" https://haml.info/

If you'd rather write raw HTML, keeping track of closing tags etc, then don't use HAML. No need to bash it because you personally feel it is ugly or unnecessary. FWIW I personally feel the exact opposite.

Personally, I'd recommend Maud if you don't need something with runtime reloading. Not only is it much faster, it implements a template language that is effectively the Rust-syntax equivalent to Slim or Haml using a procedural macro, so you get compile-time verification that your HTML output is well-formed.

Does this support HAML-style syntax? We're 100% HAML-only for templating, whether normal Rails views or ViewComponent... https://github.com/haml/haml https://haml.info/ so going back to writing HTML or ERB feels like a huge downgrade.

For templating, Maud is fast, gives compile-time well-formedness guarantees, and outputs minified HTML by default as a side-effect of it being based on Rust macros. (It's of a similar design philosophy to Slim and Haml)

You don’t even need closing tags. Both Haml and Jade do away with closing tags altogether.

That looks awfully like HAML.

Your HBML is similar to HAML - is it time for HCML? https://haml.info/

it's an HTML preprocessor called HAML