Victor, Thanks for the nice comments and for emailing. I believe I know exactly what is going on for you. It turns out that NVU doesn''t do a good job of writing out valid xhtml. No matter what you tell it to save as, it writes out html with the difference being that it leaves its tags unclosed. It will write out <link src=""> and never write out the closing tag nor will it close the link tag <link src="" /> It does the same thing for many other tags too. So what is written out is not valid xhtml and the rexml parser complains with the error you saw below. Fortunately it is pretty easy to fix by installing Tidy. You can have MasterView run Tidy for you while loading or you can use Tidy manually to clean up the file after you save it in NVU. The latter being somewhat tedious and cutting down on productivity. So I would recommend that you let MasterView do it for you. This is pretty easy to setup. 1) If tidy is not already installed on your system you can get it from http://tidy.sourceforge.net/#binaries Make note of where the library libtidy.so (on *nix) or tidy.dll (on windows) is installed, we will need the path later in step 3. 2) Next you need the ruby gem that interfaces with it called tidy gem install tidy 3) Edit or create the config file in your RAILSAPP/config/masterview/settings.rb and put the following in it to enable tidy. And set the path to what you noted from step 1. config.default_parser_options[:tidy] = true config.tidy_path = ''/usr/lib/libtidy.so'' # *nix #config.tidy_path = ''c:/tidy/bin/tidy.dll'' # Win32 Now when you fire restart your rails app, tidy should be enabled and you shouldn''t have any further problems. MasterView will run the html through tidy which will fix those problems producing valid xhtml which can be parsed. This will all happen automatically once you install tidy and configure it for your app. Finally just so you know, I want to make this even easier for people so they don''t have to do these steps manually. So just know we are working on simplifying all this. I may even try to open up the NVU source and fix it there, so it will generate xhtml properly and we won''t need tidy at all. Of course I haven''t seen that code yet, so I don''t know what it will take. And for your final question, there are two schools of thought as to whether using WYSIWYG editor is best for ruby. One camp says its easier to just write ruby code directly which is what the rails core team has led people to do. That is fine, however it breaks down in the real world for most of the projects I have been involved in. First, I am slow at styling things manually. So unless you want a bare bones site that looks pretty plain, then it is going to take me a long time to go through and apply styles and formatting through all the various rails pages to get the look I want. Also since things are split out into so many files, you are having to jump over here for one thing then back there for another and you never know how it will look until you run it again. Contrast that to using something like NVU, which shows you exactly what it will look like as you change things. You know how it will layout and can easily manipulate and change things. Plus since MasterView is taking care of splitting it out into disparate files you can efficiently work in one per action. Another strong argument for MasterView is when your boss gives you a prototype html that he wants you to make real. With MV you simply take the prototype and add some directives to it and you are done. Your boss can simply re-edit/style it later if he wants to tweak things. To do this the pure rhtml way, would require you to dice up the file, putting pieces of the html here, and pieces there, you''d probably want to replace all the input tags with rails helpers so that you can take advantage of encapsulated rails functionality, so that is a bit of work, and when you are done, now you have to make each and every style change that is ever wanted... manually in those 20 files. So you can either let wysiwyg editors help you style things or you can do it all manually. Plus if it is as easy as using a wysiwyg editor to change style or wording of labels, then now you can give that to a graphic designer, your boss, or the legal department, you the programmer are no longer required to do the mundane things and can focus on what is fun, the programming and business logic. Even in a small company you might be working with external designers, or even the client themselves providing or tweaking html, they might even need to have their legal department review things before it goes live. So there are the main two arguments as I see them, obviously I am sided towards WYSIWYG editing or I wouldn''t spend the time to make the project, but hopefully you can start to understand when it would be useful. Plus we are just getting started with the power of MasterView. The real power is going to be in creating your own custom directives or when people share powerful directives, then it is going to get real fun. (We''re just finishing refactoring the directive api to make it dead simple to create directives.) By adding a directive to a piece of html might enable a ton of functionality that you would have had to manually type in. For instance we are planning for some directives that will take an ordinary table and make it a sortable, pageable, ajax''d grid . Even if you were to do this with ajax scaffold generator, it creates a mess of code that I would not want to maintain. With this custom directive, there won''t be any mess it will be clean and very simple to enable. So stay tuned, this coming soon :-) Hope that answered your questions. If I can be of further assistance, let me know. And congrats on starting your new company, its fun to be running your own business and doing what you love. Rails is a fun technology to be using for that. Jeff On 8/24/06, Victor <bluestar007 at gmail.com> wrote:> Hello Jeff, > > My name is Victor and I''m based in NYC. With my partner Simon we recently > started a small 2-person consultancy to be focused on Ruby on Rails. I just > came across Masterview recently and want to thank you for having the > inspiration to write such a piece of software, because I''ve been thinking, > sure coding manually is said to be so powerful, but if things can be done > visually, why couldn''t that be better and faster? > > I actually installed Masterview and NVU after seeing the video (which is > quite good for learning), but I quickly ran into the first error, which I > thought you might be familiar with (while I''m clueless). No matter what a > small change I make to " list.html" (generated by masterview) in NVU, > apparently it ends up being unrecognizable by Ruby: > Missing end tag for ''link'' (got "head") Line: Position: Last 80 unconsumed > characters: <body> <div class="main"> <div id="item_content" > mv:replace="@content_for_la > > > I''d appreciate if you had any suggestions. Also, do you think it is > worthwhile using such a WYSIWYG editor with Ruby? > > Thanks Jeff, > Victor > innergysoftware.com >