Beatify html?

Is there any way to beatify the html that is emitted? Some of the html that I generate dynamically is poorly formatted, and it would be somewhat difficult to make it pretty (particularly in the context of the static html that surrounds it). It there a mechanism by which I can (for debugging purposes at least) beatify the final html?

For example, is there a hook that allows one to intercept the generated html and apply final processing before emitting it?

Or perhaps there is an option in the Webrick server to beatify the output?

Or perhaps something else?

Thanks, Alex

alex wrote:

Is there any way to beatify the html that is emitted?

Get Tidy, and run this assertion from your functional tests:

  def assert_tidy(messy = @response.body, verbosity = :noisy)     scratch_html = RAILS_ROOT + '/../scratch.html' # TODO tune me!     File.open(scratch_html, 'w'){|f| f.write(messy) }     gripes = `tidy -eq #{scratch_html} 2>&1`     gripes.split("\n")     exclude, inclued = gripes.partition do |g|       g =~ / - Info\: / or       g =~ /Warning\: missing \<\!DOCTYPE\> declaration/ or       g =~ /proprietary attribute/ or       g =~ /lacks "(summary|alt)" attribute/     end     puts inclued if verbosity == :noisy     # inclued.map{|i| puts Regexp.escape(i) }     assert_xml `tidy -wrap 1001 -asxhtml #{scratch_html} 2>/dev/null`       # CONSIDER that should report serious HTML deformities   end

You can take out the assert_xml if you don't have yar_wiki (whence that comes).

The system will push a scratch.html file into your parent folder, and if the errors Tidy reports are not utterly trivial, it will barf them out when your tests run.

When upgrading old websites to Rails I always run things through Tidy -i -asxhtml, before inserting the <%%> tags. The difference in development speed is astounding, when I don't need to count the freakin' tags just to nest everything correctly.

My Short Cut with O'Reilly has lots more tips on keeping the HTML clean.

    http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510657

You could switch to markaby which makes you write everything in Ruby (akin to XmlBuilder) and emits pretty HTML (I'm pretty sure).

http://redhanded.hobix.com/inspect/markabyForRails.html

Having "beautiful" HTML code means very little for a user of your site though...

haml will give you perfect html output.

http://haml.hamptoncatlin.com/

/Dustin

Thanks to everybody for the helpful responses.

Having "beautiful" HTML code means very little for a user of your site though...

It is useful to me when I examine my output.