Good lord do I ever hate input tags. (YUI hates them too, but I’ll leave that story for another time). All the different types should really have been different tag names, and they are a total pain to use with CSS. As such, I used to end up doing tedious stuff like adding a :class option to every form element when writing Rails templates. A while back, I tried to patch Rails to get it to do this automatically, but its test suite totally baffled me at the time by applying the classes in some places but not others.

So, a quick plugin to stave off RSI:

script/plugin install
    git://github.com/jcoglan/classy_inputs

With that installed, any input tag created using a Rails view method will gain a class name matching its type attribute. Maybe I’ll have another stab at patching Rails, but I’m not promising anything.