# Starting up with Jade

> Covers the very basics of Javascript templating language Jade

URL: https://kevin.saliou.name/blog/2013-10-11-getting-started-with-jade/
Published: 2013-10-11
Tags: javascript, jade, introduction, tutorial

So as mentioned earlier, I have decided to use [Harpjs](http://harpjs.com/) for handling my publishing.

## Getting to know Jade

While Harp is pretty flexible at interpreting different file format, I had to choose between [ejs](http://embeddedjs.com/) and [Jade](http://jade-lang.com/) for handling the [layout](http://harpjs.com/docs/development/layout) of my site. I decided to go for Jade as its syntax looked nice and clean, and even reminded me Python which I'm in the process of learning. I found it very easy to pick up (specially if you know html well) and its [reference page](http://jade-lang.com/reference/) should be enough to get you started. There are some details which are not obvious, and I specially don't like the fact that tags declared within another tag (say a link within a paragraph) have to be written in raw html (or am I doing it wrong?).

My first task was then to find a template which siuts my needs, and because I'm pretty familiar with [Bootstrap](http://getbootstrap.com/"), I went ahead and converted the [Sticky footer with fixed navbar](http://getbootstrap.com/examples/sticky-footer-navbar) example they provide which looks like this :

script(src="https://gist.github.com/kbsali/6936192.js")

from HTML to Jade :

script(src="https://gist.github.com/kbsali/6936202.js")

As you can see the code is nice, clean, readable and we went down from 86 to 46 lines!