[myronmarston]

ERB is a useful tool to have in your toolbox. It's very flexible. It's capable of templating _any_ kind of text file, but since it's capable for all of them, it excels at none of them.

HTML imposes this very strict structure: tags must be closed properly. Sure, browsers can handle tag soup to varying degrees, but it's a very bad idea to have your app render invalid markup. Humans are terrible at ensuring all tags are closed properly. Computers are great at it.

When templating HTML, I prefer to use a tool the was specifically designed for HTML. HAML auto-closes tags for you. Erector (http://erector.rubyforge.org/index.html) is probably my favorite, as it auto-closes tags, allows you to write your views in pure ruby, brings the power of OOP to your views, and gives you a far more clean, testable view layer. Want to test your view? Simple: instantiate the view class with the necessary arguments, render it, and make assertions about the output.