Naked Lunch

[Alex Chaffee]

On https://github.com/pivotal/erector/issues/20 Macario Ortega and I just had an interesting discussion about "naked attributes" aka "HTML5 Mode" in Haml.

The gist is that naked attributes look cool, but browsers don't see any difference between this

<input type="text" required>




and this

<input type="text" required="true" />




Although it would be somewhat more standard if Erector did this:

<input type="text" required="required" />

Perhaps if the attribute value is true (not just truish, but the boolean true) then it should use the name of the attribute, rather than true.to_s.

We also came up with a (arguably) nice Erector/Ruby idiom for conditional attributes, in this case based on a boolean method:

input :type => 'text', :required => required? or nil

That way even if required? is false, it'll become nil, which will omit the attribute altogether.

--
Alex Chaffee - al...@stinky.com
http://alexchaffee.com
http://twitter.com/alexch