RE: HTML Tidy

Lenore Snell wrote:

> Are there proposed changes to HTML Tidy to bring it up to widely used
> code? For example:

Tidy fixes "widely used" (but bad) markup right now.  That's why it's one of
the most popular utilities around.

> 1. These days the </p> is almost always dropped. I think that started a
> couple specs ago.....

It may be omitted according the HTML specs, since HTML is based on SGML --
which allows you omit explicitly writing both start and end tags, and have
the parser infer them from the context.  But XHTML requires them.  If you
don't care about "well-formed" markup, use

	hide-endtags: no

in the config file.

> 2. The table summary attribute is almost never used and the table still
> loads fine in almost every browser out there. Is it necessary to spit
> out those warnings?

It's just a warning.  It's meant to remind you that non-visual browsers can
have problems with tables, and that the summary attribute can help.  You can
suppress warnings with

	show-warnings: no

in the config file if you like.

> 3. Why support CSS? It's not even widely adopted (or should I say
> implemented very well) in standard browsers to date. To give an example
> of what I mean, go to a site with layers and try to print it out in
> Netscape and then in Explorer. You'll see it's pretty dangers to develop
> a site navigation based on that. I do agree with the concept of CSS
> although I strongly recommend not using it because of it's lack of
> real-world support by major browsers to date. It's just as easy to type,
> for example, the text and links colors in html and do a search/replace
> to fix it (maybe this is a few seconds slower but it does and is
> supported by all browsers).

That's up to you.  Tidy defaults to

	clean: no

so it won't remove your presentational markup unless you tell it otherwise.
Just suppress the warnings if you don't like the advice Tidy gives.


/Jelks

Received on Wednesday, 11 October 2000 23:42:41 UTC