- From: Main identity <gr@3bearz.freeserve.co.uk>
- Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2001 16:15:25 -0500 (EST)
- To: <html-tidy@w3.org>
Dave, Having read about it in O'Reilly's excellent "XML in a Nutshell", I downloaded the Windows .exe version of your Tidy program today from your page at w3.org, along with the Windows GUI. I ran Tidy on one of my HTML files to convert it to XHTML and at first sight the result was great - my XHTML version displayed exactly the same as the original HTML, in IE 5.50 under Windows ME. However I then discovered two major problems, the first of which seems to make Tidy completely unuseable. 1. When I edit the XHTML file in Notepad or Wordpad (saving as text of course) and save it again, all the line ends are lost. Refreshing the display in IE then results in an error dialogue saying "error in line 1, character 1, object expected". I tried this many times and even if I make no editing changes in Notepad or Wordpad, but just save the file, the same problem always occurs. 2. My second problem is a consequence of my HTML writing style. Throughout my site I have used thousands of anchor names for indexing purposes like this: <A NAME="xyz"><H2>Section heading</H2></A> Tidy (and presumably the XHTML specification too) doesn't like this. It wants <H2><A NAME="xyz">Section heading</A></H2> which is probably not unreasonable. What IS unreasonable, however, is that it completely omits the anchors from the XHTML output instead of changing the nesting order, and there doesn't seem to be any way of changing that behaviour in the configuration of Tidy. This again makes your program unuseable for me unless I write something to pre-process all my files to change the nesting order myself. The index is an important feature of my site (though I confess it is a few weeks out of date). I hope this is useful feedback for you. The first problem is so fundamental that I can't believe it should occur at all if other people are using Tidy successfully but I can't see what I could be doing wrong. You can find the file I used for my first test of Tidy at www.3bearz.com/diary.html. Graham
Received on Monday, 19 March 2001 01:32:15 UTC