Stylus is an excellent contender. http://learnboost.github.com/stylus/

I'd vouch it makes haml look like someone took stylus code and spat random characters all over it. It's even got its own compass equivalent, nib: https://github.com/visionmedia/nib

Stylus is for CSS, not HTML.

Oh wow, I remember looking at my post thinking: "something's wrong here, oh well." I actually meant Jade:

http://jade-lang.com/.

Jade makes HAML look like a dogs breakfast.

You sir, are correct in that. Slim also merits a looking at, but I write everything [static] in Jade first and then transfer the output to whatever, yeah, JSP's. There's a significant performance hit from using non-HTML at run time, +40% in some cases, as was Haml back a couple of years ago. Probably a good reason why RoR adopted Sass yet shied away from Haml.

The Ruby slim templates get compiled to an intermediate language (Temple). That is then compiled into an end form and everything is cached - the performance is all the same.

RoR didn't pick Haml because Haml abandons HTML. Take a look at the Hamlet language which give the best of both worlds. https://github.com/gregwebs/hamlet.js https://github.com/gregwebs/hamlet.rb

I just released a port of Slim with embedded CoffeeScript: https://github.com/jfirebaugh/skim

If you prefer HAML, check out https://github.com/9elements/haml-coffee

You can use Serenade pretty much as a static template engine if you want to. It's quite small (9k), so not a huge dependency.