The W3C Validator complained that I didn’t have the rows and cols attributes on my <textarea> tags. My code for them looked like:

 
<%= text_area_tag :message, params[:message] %>

And I don’t want to add the :size option because I use CSS to style all of them, it’d be confusing to see an unused size there. So I extended the text_area_tag method in my app/helpers/application_helper.rb to fill in a default:

 
module ApplicationHelper
  def text_area_tag(name, content=nil, options={})
    super(name, content, { :size => "40x10" }.update(options))
  end
end

And it was that easy to start having valid tags. I’ll be posting more Rails snippets and tips as I work on my project, and I’ll definitely announce here when it’s ready for wide release.

(This snippet owes thanks to ‘leethal’ in #rubyonrails on irc.freenode.net for straightening out how I was trying to override the method.)