From: Phlip <phlip2005@...>
Date: 2007-10-21T08:46:22+09:00
Subject: Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (is this guy ok?)

> I don't know about all his work, but hpricot is fantastic and popular.

The specific deal with Hpricot is nobody wants to parse and write HTML that 
could be ill-formed. XHTML is simple to parse, and browsers can't accept 
strict XHTML. So HTML lived in a dead-spot. If you had to edit it, you'd 
target specific strings with gsub. And if this lead to an encoding problem, 
you'd simply have garbage-in-garbage-out.

With Hpricot, you can freely convert ill-formed HTML into an object model, 
and back into HTML

We used Hpricot to launch a successful project at work, with its Lilu 
wrapper. This let our graphic artists upgrade our graphics, decoupled from 
our developer's source code. Lilu uses Hpricot to locate class tags and 
replace their contents with our data. This, in turn, decouples our graphics 
teams and development teams, leading to a very successful website.

And Hpricot allows assertions in tests that read HTML, via assert_hpricot.

-- 
  Phlip
  http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510657/
  "Test Driven Ajax (on Rails)"
  assert_xpath, assert_javascript, & assert_ajax