Re: Tidy Request

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Jelks Cabaniss wrote:

> 1)  If there is no ALT attribute for an image, have Tidy put in
> an 'alt=""'. (Note: this might cause some people problems, since
> they might want omitted ALTs to be flagged by a validator as a
> reminder for "Whoops, you forgot to put in alternate text".  So
> perhaps it should be a configurable option:
> "empty-alt-attributes: yes" or some such.)

This is a sensitive issue, but provided the default is not
to do this, then perhaps my life would be spared. ;-)

> 2)  I discovered this when transferring some old markup
> containing a client side imagemap to XHTML.  The new XHTML had
> <map name="...">, but XHTML (and HTML 4.01) require ID as well,
> so it didn't validate.  So perhaps when Tidy sees a NAME
> attribute with no corresponding ID attribute, it should insert
> the ID attribute with the same value as the NAME one ...

Yes, I have already implemented this in preparation for the next
release, along with setting the type attribute on style and script.

> 3)  It would be nice if Tidy's clean option would take the
> BGCOLOR and BACKGROUND attributes of BODY, TD, TR, TABLE and
> convert them to CSS classes like it does FONT[1].  Same with
> BODY's TEXT, LINK, ALINK, and VLINK attributes (eg. with '<body
> vlink="blue">', it deletes the attribute and inserts "a:visited
> { color: blue }" into the embedded CSS).  (Those who care
> excessively about 'how it looks on old browsers' may want to
> keep *some* presentational HTML, so perhaps this should be done
> only when clean is specified *with* one of the Strict DOCTYPEs?)
> 
> [1] Note the transitional DTD does not have a BACKGROUND
> attribute for TD, TR, and TABLE, but at least for TD I have seen
> it used on a number of occasions ("DTD? What's a bloody DTD?"
> :), so perhaps Tidy should replace a BACKGROUND attribute on
> *any* [x]HTML element with a CLASS="whatever" and a
> corresponding CSS declaration.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Regards,

-- Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
phone: +44 122 578 2984 (or 2521) +44 385 320 444 (gsm mobile)
World Wide Web Consortium (on assignment from HP Labs)

Received on Monday, 4 October 1999 09:55:10 UTC