Cleaning Rails' ugly HTML output

rubyonrails-talk
1

is there a way of cleaning rails' html output? by default, it looks real ugly (in terms of indentation), and i don't know how people can live with that. there is rails-tidy, and although it makes html really pretty, setting it up involves some tricky workarounds, and the author also commented:

"THIS IS CERTAINLY A RESOURCE HOG. I’m not interrested in this feature so I didn’t benchmarked it but at first sight rendering is at least 2 times slower with the filter enabled."?

is there anything better out there?

2

ago it was one of its goals.

Fred

3

<opinion> If it renders fine in a browser, who cares what it looks like under the hood? </opinion>

That being said, haml as a replacement for erb, produces some nicely formatted html if you're into viewing page source. It may have been a goal of the author, but I just like the cleaner forms I have to produce.

4

Yeah HAML is gorgeous, however, it's whitespace sensitive making it impossible for me to join things that should be joined.

5

*shudder*

XHTML:     <small class="code" id="message">Hello, World!</small>

Haml:     %small{:class => "code", :id => "message"} Hello, World!

Seems less gorgeous to me... >_> I like my rhtml. Although I dunno how your output doesn't look nice, mine does. Perhaps you're using tags I'm not.

6

In all seriousness, I’ve been doing web programming for a long time. If I’m generating HTML from a web application, I just don’t care what the rendered HTML code looks like, and I can’t figure out why people do. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this question, so am I missing something? If it validates, and it renders, then does it matter?

7

I just think good design should flow through every aspect of an app...

8

I just look at it in firebug to see the layout. Much easier that dealing with the raw source and links the css nicely as well.

Fundamentally in Rails, it is how clean the ERB is to look at rather than the HTML. You don't take a C program and then complain that the assembler output from the compiler is not very pretty.

9

How about (HAML):

%small#message.code Hello, World! === <small class="code" id="message">Hello, World!</small>

Now that's gorgeous. I know which I'd rather type. You only need to use the hash braces if you're doing something more conditional, and then you can just put it in a helper and call the method

e.g.

%small{choose_class(somevar)} Hello, World!

def choose_class(somevar)    {:class => somevar ||= 'default', :id => 'message'} ##approximately, untested! end

I agree the 2-space indenting can be a pain, well it was till i discovered my text editor did multi-line select.

HAML rules, and SASS makes CSS like it should be :wink:

Each to their own though....

10

Wildtangent wrote:

Each to their own though....

Agreed... my standard indentation in Rails (controllers, models, helpers, etc) is 2 spaces, so doing that for the views is just second nature (be it erb or haml)... but I'm a lazy bastidge at heart, so if indentation can imply all those closing tags and the view code is less for my poor brain to process, I'm all for it.