Good notes posted by tomharrisonjr

HTML5 data- attributes using RESTful approach

HTML5 specifies extensible attributes like data-foo=“bar” (or as in Twitter Bootstrap data-toggle=“modal”), which poses two problems for Rails.

First, if you’re using symbol notation in link_to to specify attributes, this fails (dash is not a valid symbol character), so

Invalid!

link_to "Edit", @user, :class => "btn", :data-toggle => "modal"

There are two solutions:

1. put the symbols in quotes,

2. use the special :data hash

Solution 1: Quote Symbols

link_to "Edit", @user, :class => "btn", "data-toggle" => "modal"

Solution 2: Use the :data hash

link_to "Edit", @user, :class => "btn", :data => {:toggle => "modal"}

Resulting HTML

<a href="/users/1" class="btn", data-toggle="modal">Edit</a>

The second is minimally documented, but as a hash, can accept multiple values and is perhaps a little cleaner