One can apply all the good practices from this talk while using Haml, which will give you a *substantial* increase in readability of your views, for free.

HTML is just too verbose and repetitive. The least that Haml will do for you is cutting out all that redundancy. Tools like “ZenCoder” are a crutch for those cases where Haml is not available (I have nothing against ZenCoder & friends, I think they are quite elegant tools).

Sticking with html just because that’s what everybody knows is not generally a great attitude for moving things forward. Html is damn ugly and I welcome any efforts that allow me to write it quicker.

I use ruby because It allows me to write decent code quickly & easily. I use haml for that same reason.

Phil – I’m not a huge fan of any framework, mainly because I’ve seen non-techies in larger teams just go cross-eyed when trying to work with them. We had our own (Shway) that was quite powerful and had skins, skeletons, presenters, and ruby-driven CSS. We ended up removing it from all our projects because only a few people in the company could work with it. These things tend to be great for an individual or small team that knows what they are doing with them.

I think there are some cool elements to Compass (and SASS as well) but I personally tend to avoid them. The most important factor is figuring out if your team can use it and that the project will benefit from its use. If either answer is no, I’d think twice before pushing it forward.

Even in his presentation, John says he endorses the “image_sprite” helper that spits out markup, since the payoff is so high. Keep it lean, keep it clean, I think that’s the rule of thumb.