This is a kind of brain dump. I'm going to add to this over time. I spend a lot of time in templating code with jsp taglibs and velocity markup. CSS is a recurring pain so I keep my eyes open for new tools.

Editor Tools

DownloadSquad posted on the Zen Coding project offers a new fast tag completion for writing html and css quickly. It has support for a number of text editors, but not Vim.

Zen Coding v0.5 from Sergey Chikuyonok on Vimeo.

On Slashdot somebody pointed to http://mattn.github.com/zencoding-vim/ which offers a similar functionality to Zen Coding.

These are both keyBoard Shortcut style scripting environments, I was impressed with the speed of them, and they of course mean less typing, but I'm not sure that I still produce enough html these days to make the extra learning pay off. My usual Vim plugins make html pretty painless anyway.

From the Ruby World

On the other hand another slashdotter pointed to Haml and Sass. these are terse /abbreviated markup styles that get compiled into normal html / css by the Ruby compiler.

Haml

Haml, offers an indentation based shorthand for generating html. I got the feeling though that once the html got more complicated, the shorthand notation wasn't much less complicated than the html, and perhaps less legibl

Sass

Sass on the other hand has some really great features adding some basic programmatic elements to css with variables and mixins, promoting good DRY concepts in CSS:

Variables

this:

// Sass

!blue = #3bbfce
!margin = 16px

.content_navigation
  border-color = !blue
  color = !blue - #111

.border
  padding = !margin / 2
  margin = !margin / 2
  border-color = !blue

becomes:

/* CSS */

.content_navigation {
  border-color: #3bbfce;
  color: #2aaebd;
}

.border {
  padding: 8px;
  margin: 8px;
  border-color: #3bbfce;
}

Mixins

this:

// Sass

=table-scaffolding
  th
    text-align: center
    font-weight: bold
  td, th
    padding: 2px

=left(!dist)
  float: left
  margin-left = !dist

#data
  +left(10px)
  +table-scaffolding

becomes:

/* CSS */

#data {
  float: left;
  margin-left: 10px;
}
#data th {
  text-align: center;
  font-weight: bold;
}
#data td, #data th {
  padding: 2px;
}

Now this would be great if I could get this in Java. perhaps some kind of maven plugin would be what I need. I'll have to research a little further here....