Re: Uses of tidy [Was: Re: Duplicate attribute names]

At 14:49 08.11.2000 -0500, Larry W. Virden wrote:
>From: "Richard A. O'Keefe" <ok@atlas.otago.ac.nz>
> > The problem here is that a lot of us use Tidy on HTML that we did not
> > write and do not have ready access to the author of.  Sometimes when
>
>I'm curious about some of the uses people are making of tidy.
>
>I use tidy on my own code, or that of co-workers, so that we can improve it.
>I even have used it on pages on the web that are crashing my browser - I
>then send suggested changes to the authors.
>
>But you list a new use that intrigues me-  running tidy on code that
>you didn't write ... for what is this processed html being used?

Initially, I ran into tidy when I was looking for a way to clean up HTML 
input from users of my chat site. My interest in learning Perl came up 
parallel to the shutdown of a chat site that I used to attend once in a 
while, so I decided to program a replacement. This other chat site (as well 
as many others) was using a buffer string of many closing tags to prevent 
rendering errors resulting from unclosed HTML tags, but this approach did 
not appeal to me.
Then I found Tidy and am using it since, the users' messages are passed to 
tidy and on tidy's result I do a little more processing (throwing away the 
HTML, HEAD, TITLE, DOCUMENT and similar tags) and then output the cleaned 
message.

So, this was my first contact to Tidy, about 1.5 years ago.

At work, I am using Tidy to clean up code produced by my co-workers (too 
many of them use Dreamweaver & Co.) and,  on more recent projects, to 
convert and ensure consistency to XHTML.

Often, I am told to work on HTML code by unknown authors (or authoring 
systems) that is virtually unreadable... then I use tidy to pretty print it 
and allow me to actually work on it.

It is a hard task to make people write good code, but tidy is a great help!


my $.02
sebastian

--
Sebastian Lange
http://www.sl-chat.de/
Maybe the first chat site that validates as HTML
4.0 even though user input may contain HTML codes.

Courtesy to Dave Raggett's HTML Tidy:
http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/

Tidy your documents ONLINE:
http://www.sl-chat.de/Tidy/

Received on Thursday, 16 November 2000 10:10:33 UTC