[ENH] Tidy should be quieter with Quiet option

This report is for the Tidy version of 13th January 2000.

The "quiet" option reports that its function is to "suppress nonessential
output."  Currently, this will suppresses the output of the welcome message
and the summary of the numbers of errors and warnings.  However, I believe
that it would be helpful if "quiet" also suppressed the "general info"
emitted as the last paragraph for files containing warnings or errors.  In
my view, the general info at the end is also "nonessential output."  This
can be changed by altering lines 1116-1117 of tidy.c from:

  if (totalerrors + totalwarnings > 0)
      GeneralInfo(errout);to:

  if (!Quiet && (totalerrors + totalwarnings > 0))
      GeneralInfo(errout);
I also believe that "quiet" should suppress the summary of error
remediation recommendations for the same reason.  This can be done by
altering line 1102 from:

  ErrorSummary(lexer);to:

  if (!Quiet)
    ErrorSummary(lexer);With these two changes, "quiet" will suppress all nonessential information
from the report.  However, if the current "quiet" behavior is deemed best,
perhaps a new level of quietness, e.g., "quieter", could be introduced that
would have this effect.


As a separate issue, I think the number of errors and warnings and Tidy's
interpretation of the HTML version, e.g., "xxx appears to be yyy", should
be reported always, regardless of the "quiet" setting.  The assumed HTML
version especially is important if one is to be able to interpret in the
proper context the errors and warnings that appear when "quiet" is used.
To me, this is "essential information."

If the current behavior is believed best, then I would recommend
introducing a new "summary-always" configuration option that controls the
output of these two lines and that defaults to "no".  In the "no" mode, the
summary lines would be suppressed as part of "quiet".  In the "yes" mode,
the summary lines would be output always.

                                      -- Dave

Received on Friday, 24 March 2000 12:46:57 UTC