I would argue, from personal experience, that anytime you can either 1-remove a class of errors, or 2-move that error discovery sooner to the time of authorship or compilation you have likely reduced the number of bugs that you will ship with. HAML accomplishes this for tag closing errors.
but with the downside that incorrect nesting errors are less visible. When elements are spaced far apart vertically it can be hard to tell if the indents are the same; whereas with a closing tag it can be more obvious, particularly if your editor highlights the matching opening/closing tag to the one your cursor is over. If your editor can show HTML validation errors then tag closing errors are also visible.
A valid point, although I have had the opposite experience. I can site down a line of code and see what is indented, as it is physically more to the right. The highlighting of matching tags doesn't work well for me because in highly dense or imperfectly formatted code, I'm not sure which tag I want it to be highlighting for the close tag in the first place.
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I would argue, from personal experience, that anytime you can either 1-remove a class of errors, or 2-move that error discovery sooner to the time of authorship or compilation you have likely reduced the number of bugs that you will ship with. HAML accomplishes this for tag closing errors.
but with the downside that incorrect nesting errors are less visible. When elements are spaced far apart vertically it can be hard to tell if the indents are the same; whereas with a closing tag it can be more obvious, particularly if your editor highlights the matching opening/closing tag to the one your cursor is over. If your editor can show HTML validation errors then tag closing errors are also visible.
A valid point, although I have had the opposite experience. I can site down a line of code and see what is indented, as it is physically more to the right. The highlighting of matching tags doesn't work well for me because in highly dense or imperfectly formatted code, I'm not sure which tag I want it to be highlighting for the close tag in the first place.