Marking up errors on forms.
Frederick Cheung
appropriate class. Unfortunately this means that you can't place these
in <p> tags which many do (including for example the rails scaffold).
It is a simple change to generate spans instead of divs (or generally
make any sort of change that seems appropriate).
This may break the appearance of your app, whether it's because of
style rules attached to div.fieldWithErrors that will no longer apply
or because the styles that previously applied to broken html look
different on correct html. Unfortunately this is the sort of breakage
that is hard to verify automatically. So it seems there are three ways
forward (not counting the 'do nothing' way:
- change the default settings to generate spans. It's not hard for you
to change it back to divs in an initializer or something if you need
it the old way
- leave the current defaults but have a span based markup in the
rails3_new_defaults initializer so that new apps will get 'good'
behaviour
- the current code sucks and it would be much nicer to have this sort
of stuff controller by the form builder rather than some setting on
ActionView::Base (and once you've done that rewrite then you still
have to decide what actual markup is generated by default)
Opinions appreciated (assuming you're not drunk on christmas cheer)
Fred
Ticket is here http://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994-ruby-on-rails/tickets/1626
Josh Susser
It would be a lot easier to write CSS to style the forms if the div
(or span) was there even when there weren't errors, and then changed
class depending on whether there was an error. I don't think div vs
span is a big deal since you can style them to be inline or block as
you choose. Usually I end up writing my own form builder class so
this stuff isn't an issue for me, but the times when I do end up using
the default form builder my CSS always gets super ugly.
I'm not familiar with how the Merb form generator does things. Maybe
it's time for a look.
--
Josh Susser
http://blog.hasmanythrough.com
Chris Cruft
Letting the form builder control the error markup is appropriate. A
default configuration that renders a shared partial for errors might
be a good approach -that would allow customization of layout without
customization of code.
Otherwise, I like Josh's suggestion of having the structure remain
constant (divs/spans present) is a good idea
-Chris
> The insertion of the div only when errors are present is a real pain.
> It would be a lot easier to write CSS to style the forms if the div
> (or span) was there even when there weren't errors, and then changed
> class depending on whether there was an error. I don't think div vs
> span is a big deal since you can style them to be inline or block as
> you choose. Usually I end up writing my own form builder class so
> this stuff isn't an issue for me, but the times when I do end up using
> the default form builder my CSS always gets super ugly.
>
> I'm not familiar with how the Merb form generator does things. Maybe
> it's time for a look.
>
> --