RE: Bugs/suggestions

Matthew Brealey wrote:

> <div style="margin-left: 2em">

> However, even this is unsatisfactory, because the author that tidies their
> page in Tidy will be surprised to find their page destroyed in Internet
> Explorer 3.0 (though not 3.01, 3.02 or 3.03), as used by approximately 3%
> of the WWW. For this browser treats ems as pixels (as indeed do all 3.0?
> versions), ...

> I would like to see an option to leave the (invalid) OL and UL elements as
> they are.

IMO, this would be a bad idea.  The purpose of Tidy is to *clean up* invalid
(and unwellformed) markup.  (Note that Tidy inserting 'style="margin-left: 2em"'
is, I believe, a bug -- with or without IE3's em-is-a-pixel problem.)

> Another thing that need fixing is that Tidy doesn't check that STYLE or
> LINK rel="stylesheet" declares the type attribute.

Agreed.

> I do wish Tidy wouldn't think that its users are idiots and don't know
> that inline elements can't span block ones ...

Tidy thinks very highly of its users.

Seriously, the problem has to do with the common
HTML-perceived-as-a-formatting-language hack of:

	<i>
	<p>This paragraph will be italicized, because italics is on.</p>
	<p>And so will this one.</p>
	</i>
	<p>Italics has now been turned off.</p>

That's the mess Tidy was designed to clean up.  It can't read your mind.  It
does handle a large *majority* of cases with aplomb.

[ a lot of suggestions re NAME tokens, etc. snipped ]

> It would be useful for Tidy to check the validity of class and ID tokens;
> for example, many people use invalid classes such as
> class="1invalididentifier" or "-invalid" - these will (correctly) be
> ignored by many browsers.

Tidy is not (at least at this point in time) an HTML validator.  I *always*
check my my documents with a validator after Tidying.  Two good online
validators are:

	http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/
	http://validator.w3.org

(Note: the first one above is really excellent -- it allows, for example, file
uploading -- but it seems to be down at the moment.)

Or try Liam Quinn's excellent (offline) Windows app:

	http://www.arealvalidator.com

> If hide-endtags: yes and clean: yes, Tidy drops highly meaningful BODY
> tags;

Then I would not request hide-endtags.  How should Tidy know what is
"meaningful" to you?  According the HTML DTDs, the endtag for BODY is
optional...

> Why doesn't clean clean TABLE backgrounds?

Agreed.  Also BODY attributes, TD BGCOLOR, etc.  Somewhere this was discussed
(the Tidy web page? here?).  I think the objection given was that there wasn't
enough CSS support in the installed base to warrant it.

I think a possible solution is to to add "all" as a clean option, so that

	clean: all

moves *everything* presentational to CSS.

> Tidy is destroying my pages - it is adding type="text/javascript" to my
> SCRIPT language="jscript1.2" element. Although type is required, if you
> add it Internet Explorer will ignore the (yes I know deprecated) language
> attribute, which causes serious problems - there should be an option to stop
> it doing this.

I disagree, for the same reason as given before: Tidy's purpose is to fix
invalid markup, not to cowtow to current or future buggy browsers.  Should Tidy
start intentionally emitting invalid [x]HTML, I suspect you'll see its
popularity wane.

/Jelks

Received on Monday, 14 February 2000 17:03:15 UTC