Browse the Ruby on Rails Community.

You are here: Browse Railsplugins Responsible Markup

Responsible Markup

= responsible_markup plugin for Rails Because you shouldn’t ship unless it’s valid.

A plugin which provides tests for
  • (X)HTML markup validity…
  • Unobtrusive Javascript…
  • Backwards-compatible XHTML…
  • ...and other hallmarks of responsible web development

Why? Because I’m lazy. Unless there’s someone around to call me on it, I’ll write markup which works, but which doesn’t follow best practices. After all, it’s easier to stuff a bunch of display data into a style attribute than it is to refactor my CSS classes.

This is a set of assertions to use in unit tests and functional tests to keep us (read: me) honest. We (read: I) owe it to ourselves, our clients, our employers, and the world in general, to produce the highest quality code we can.

Do it for the children.

Remember to check your CSS[http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/], {RSS/Atom}[http://feedvalidator.org/], and XML[http://www.stg.brown.edu/service/xmlvalid/] output as well.

Installation

If your project is source-controlled by Subversion (which it should be, really), the easiest way to install this is via Rails' plugin script:

./script/plugin install -x http://svn.codahale.com/responsible_markup/trunk

If you're not using Subversion, or if you don't want it adding svn:externals in your project, remove the -x switch:

./script/plugin install http://svn.codahale.com/responsible_markup/trunk

Alternatively, you can just check the trunk out from the repository, if you're super-DIY.

cd path_to_rails_app
cd vendor/plugins
svn co http://svn.codahale.com/responsible_markup/trunk responsible_markup

Or you can go to the website and download various release archives: http://plugins.codahale.com/responsible_markup

Usage

=== Overview

1. Install the plugin. (See previous section) 2. Write unit tests, incorporating the various assertions provided. 3. Develop application, secure in the knowledge that ResponsibleMarkup will call you on your laziness.

=== Specifics

See the documentation for ResponsibleMarkup for a full list of assertions and their usage.

Using Your Own Validator

If you’re using this often (as you should be), you should go ahead and install a local copy of the W3C Validator. Doing this will speed up your tests as well as reduce the load on the public W3C Validator. assert_valid_html caches the results in the temp directory, but any large set of tests will generate upwards of a hundred requests. It makes sense to have the time per request as low as possible.

To install the W3C Validator on a local server, follow these instructions: http://validator.w3.org/docs/install.html

To use a local validator, follow this example: require ‘test/unit’

class ValidityTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
  ResponsibleMarkup::validator_uri = 'http://127.0.0.1/validator/check'
end
def setup
  html_content = generated_by_magic_process(:go_go_xhtml)
end
def test_validity
  assert_valid_html(html_content, "http://foo/bar/squee isn't valid XHTML")
end
Resources = Subversion
  • http://svn.codahale.com/responsible_markup
= Blog
  • http://blog.codahale.com

== Credits

Written by Coda Hale <coda>.

Released under the MIT license (see MIT-LICENSE).

W3C results downloading & caching code lifted from Scott Raymond’s {assert_valid_markup plugin}[http://redgreenblu.com/svn/projects/assert_valid_markup/]. Excerpting and backtrace-cleaning code lifted from the Rails source. The structure of the Rake file and a few other layout conventions were lifted from Geoffrey Grosenbach’s {ar_fixtures}[http://nubyonrails.com/articles/2005/12/27/dump-or-slurp-yaml-reference-data] plugin.

Finally, thanks to my employer, both for paying me to work with Ruby and Rails on a daily basis, and also for allowing me to release code which I developed for them.

NOTE: This description has been extracted from the Plugin README and so the formatting may need updating to make browser friendly