JTidy Error Reporting

I would like to make a few suggestions as to error reporting in JTidy.  My
general complaint is that Tidy is just too plain verbose in its error
reporting.  My secondary complaint is that you cannot shutdown the error
summaries.

What I consider a defect first:

In JTidy you can turn off warning Tidy.setShowWarnings(false).  This turns
off warning lines but does not suppress the error summaries.  In my mind the
error summaries are worse than the warnings themselves.  Error summaries are
printed, with disregard to the ShowWarnings flag, using the method
Report.errorSummary(lexer);

My general complaint:

I would like to see tidy use either the DOM3 (SAX parser) error handling
concepts of Fatal Error, Error, and Warning or use the concept of Error,
Warning, and Information.

For example, to me this warning is a valid warning:
line 5 column 40 - Warning: <tr> unknown attribute value "CENTER"

HOWEVER this warning is not a vaild warning, it is informational in nature
line 5 column 1 - Warning: <table> lacks "summary" attribute

I have embedded tidy in our product line but its hard to match up the tidy
errors/warnings with those that are used by our content mangement system.  A
user may be concerned with eliminating warnings but may not care about
informational type messages.  Currently, tidy is way to verbose for a user
to reasonably asked to go through its output (especially when dealing with
hundreds of files) to determine if there was a REAL problem or not.

Steven L. Murray
eBusiness Technologies

Received on Monday, 11 December 2000 11:05:53 UTC