This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Ryan Davis. Original Post: CSS for layout? bah! Use ASCII art! Feed Title: Polishing Ruby Feed URL: http://blog.zenspider.com/index.rdf Feed Description: Musings on Ruby and the Ruby Community... Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Ryan Davis Latest Posts From Polishing Ruby

I stole the code posted on reddit earlier today and ported it to ruby. Now I can do the following:

layout = BoxLayout.html <<-END
----------
|        |
----------
| |    | |
| |    | |
| |    | |
| |    | |
----------
|        |
----------
END

puts layout % [header, left_sidebar,
               body,
               right_sidebar, footer]

and get layout code that looks much much cleaner than the equivalent HTML/rhtml/whatever. I can instantly look at this code and know what it is gonna look like in a browser. I'll release this soon, but I have some enhancements for codeforpeople's rubyforge and seattle.rb's hoe first.