Re: View Source

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> 
> Arbitrarily replying to Henri's post here, although my remarks apply to 
> the whole thread:
> 
> View Source is a UI feature and largely a tool for Web developers and 
> expert users. Seeing a cleaned up, reserialized DOM is also a cool idea 
> for a developer/expert-user feature. I believe Firebug and the WebKit 
> Web Inspector provide something similar, though primarily meant to be 
> used as an outline view, not flat text. While it may be fun to design 
> the details, I think details of UI features like this are out of scope 
> for the HTML5 spec and off topic for this list.

I tend to agree that this seems out of scope for HTML 5 and therefore 
somewhat off topic for this list. Having said that, it is worth noting 
that even a clean source view doesn't really solve the original problem 
because someone can easily copy an incomplete subtree from such a view, 
rather than a "well formed" fragment. So if you really care about 
getting well formed content out you want a "Copy this subtree" option in 
tools such as Dragonfly that show the DOM tree of the page. This seems 
to be implemented in at least some such tools already.

Received on Tuesday, 17 March 2009 10:53:52 UTC