In this episode of Dead Code, Jared talks with Marco Roth about Herb, a new fault-tolerant parser for HTML and ERB designed to improve the developer experience in the Rails ecosystem. Unlike tools like Deface or Nokogiri, Herb doesn’t auto-correct or mask errors—it parses templates exactly as written, enabling better diagnostics, formatting, and linting for server-rendered views, especially in Hotwire, Turbo, and Stimulus contexts. Built in C for portability and speed, Herb can be used across Ruby, JavaScript, and browsers via WebAssembly. Marco created it after running into limitations with existing tooling while building the Stimulus LSP. Future plans include deeper integration with tools like Ruby LSP and possibly enabling LiveView-style reactive rendering in Rails. Developers can try it today via a VS Code extension or the interactive web playground.

Links:

Deface

Spree

Solidus

Nokogiri

RuboCop

Prism

Herb

Herb Playground

Herb VS Code Extension

Hotwire

Turbo

Stimulus

StimulusReflex

Phoenix LiveView

Ruby LSP

Episode 10 with Kevin Newton on Prism

Episode 38 with Carson Gross on HTMX 

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