RE: XML Tidy?

I appreciate your flexibility.  Hopefully, less will be more in this case.
It would also be good to here +1/-1 from others on the list - on the feature
as a whole and on the details of extraction.

I can also relate to your concerns about users' knowledge of HTML.  I have
the same exact issue here at my workplace.  I have actually tried to keep
folks using MS Word, because Word2000-to-HTML-plus-Tidy works very well and
avoids most of these issues.

But they keep wanting to work with HTML.  So I give them templates, which
they copy to a new file and fill in by pasting text from Word.  In my
experience, they quickly learn to just copy the header boilerplate, change
the title.  The complicated stuff is setting the odd class name.  By making
the document stand alone, they can view the document directly to verify
their changes have been applied.  Likewise, it gives my system a document to
verify w/ Tidy.  This is important if you're going to use XSLT. If any
little thing is out of place, XSLT will just choke.

Charlie

-----Original Message-----
From: Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams [mailto:ignacio@openservices.net]
Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2001 10:21 AM
To: html-tidy@w3.org
Subject: RE: XML Tidy?


On Wed, 20 Jun 2001, Reitzel, Charlie wrote:

> How about we just go w/ a)?  Because, in practice, it's much
> easier to add a <body> (or any other) wrapper than it is to 
> remove it.  If removed, one doesn't need XSLT (which is slow 
> at run-time) to do a lot of things. Regular, old server side 
> includes will do the trick.
>
> On the flip side, since you are using XSLT, you don't need the
> new option at all.  What's wrong w/ select="html/body" at the 
> output stage?  All you need to do is have Tidy emit well-formed
> xhtml.
>
> Skip the wrapper on input and let tidy do it's thing.  Rather 
> than supress the "no title" warning, have users submit full 
> documents (<html>...</html>) and just use XSLT to pull out the 
> <body> contents.  This way, documents can stand on their own 
> as well.
>
> Charlie

a) it is.

The problem with XSLT on the output stage is that it still doesn't cover the
problems at the input stage. The users of this application are... uh, how do
I put this nicely... NOT the most computer-literate people in the world.
While they might (?)  be willing to learn a little HTML, it can't be
reasonably accepted that they will follow the W3 specs to the letter. That's
where HTML Tidy comes in. I intend to have a verification feature that uses
HTML Tidy, but I don't want to concern them with all the nitty-gritty of the
specs (i.e., header and body tags).

On top of all that, the users don't really need the pages to stand on their
own. Why would they want that when they're paying someone else to host the
compound pages? ;)

-- 
Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams  <ignacio@openservices.net>

Received on Thursday, 21 June 2001 13:27:47 UTC