Re: Purity vs Practicality?

On 29 Mar 2000, at 7:53, Larry W. Virden wrote:

> If the author of Tidy finds himself ever in the position of needing to
> decide between having Tidy 'do the right thing' vs 'support what
> Microsoft/Netscape/whomever', I do hope that the default behavior will
> be 'support the published standard' 

Tidy already doesn't do this (i.e., "support the published standard"), as 
the published HTML standard has no provision for adding new tags.  Tidy's 
"new-xxx-tags" configuration options allow generation of illegal HTML 
(e.g., it can produce, as output, a file that claims adherence with the 
HTML 4.01 standard, for example, but will not validate).  To me, that's in 
keeping with Tidy's mandate, which is to clean up valid HTML documents and 
the "pseudo-HTML" produced by programs from Microsoft, Netscape, and 
others.

I would modify your suggestion to request that Tidy never produce an 
invalid HTML document from valid source.  Clearly, if the source is valid 
HTML 4.01, for example, then valid HTML 4.01 is what Tidy should produce.  
That is, I would not want a valid page to fail validation after tidying.

                                      -- Dave

Received on Wednesday, 29 March 2000 23:17:07 UTC