FRAGMENT

Fragment is an HTML builder heavily based on Gestalt from the Ramaze framework. Its main purpose is to create fragments of HTML (hence the name), but is perfectly suited for building full pages.

In essence, Fragment works more or less like any builder.

First, how to install:

gem install fragment

Or in your Gemfile:

gem 'fragment'

Then you can require Fragment and use it that way:

require 'fragment'
 
default = 'HTML'

html = Fragment.create do
  doctype
  html(:lang=>'en') do
    head { title { "My Choice" } }
    body do
      comment "Here starts the body"
      select(:name => 'language') do
        ['JS', 'HTML', 'CSS'].each do |l|
          option(:value => l, :selected => l==default) { l }
        end
      end
      write "\n<!-- This allows to write HTML directly when using a snippet -->\n"
      write "\n<!-- like Google Analytics or including another fragment -->\n"
    end
  end
end

If you try this example, you might notice a couple of things:

First of all, you have a doctype helper which only creates an HTML5 doctype. If you want something else, you can use the write method which lets you write directly in place:

write "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN'"
write "  'http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd'>"

The major difference with Gestalt (if you used it) is that it does not accept content in the arguments. This simplifies the code a lot for a very small sacrifice. So the argument is either a Hash that represents the attributes, or a string like you would write in the HTML code.

One problem I had when creating fragments of HTML from code with a Hash for attributes is for attributes like selected or checked which are a bit annoying because they do not have a negative value (not that I know of), so you cannot write things like:

selected='not_selected'

I find this slightly irritating. So what I did is that in the Hash, when a value is false, its key is removed. This is what I did on the long example above for marking the default option.

Nothing fancy but quite good to be aware of.

If you need more control on the scope of variables and basically stay in the scope you are in, you can add an argument to the block which represents the fragment itself. The change of arity changes the scope and since you are in the current scope, every fragment method has to be called on the fragment object. Here is an example which hopefully makes it clearer:

html = Fragment.create do |f|
  f.h1 { "" }
end

Do not hesitate to fork the project if you want to help me improve it.

Thanx
Mig

mig-hub / fragment

FRAGMENT

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