RE: Tidy for web based app?

Hi Manos,

Great questions, but perhaps I am biased.  I have written (and support) a
web based XML editor and, separately, I also use Tidy for web publishing of
HTML.

A couple things.  My XML editor is medium-tech.  I parse the DTD and
generate a config file that drives a form generator package.  It is good for
throwing up a data entry form for simple to medium complexity XML instance
docs.  We use it to maintain data sets and parameter sets used by financial
modelling tools and it works well for this purpose.  It is also useful to
decouple simple data maintenance from UI/presentation.  We can configure
XSLT pages to render a particular "Document Type" (defined as the DTD URL +
the root element name).

Document editing, however, is much more complex.  Further, the DTD does not
fully describe the document semantics (for either SGML or XML variants of
HTML).  So I ask folks to use their HTML editor of choice and run everything
through Tidy at upload time.  I also convert everything to XHTML on the way
in, so that anyone can pull out document fragments using generic XML tools.
Within the system, we just use Tidy, but this feature is still experimental.

ActiveX is probably a decent way to go.  I.e. you need a more response UI
for document editing than HTML forms can provide.  

There is a TidyCOM component included with TidyGUI (See
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/ablavier/TidyCOM/).  That said, one of the primary
motivations for the SourceForge project is to build a library version of
Tidy to make it simpler to integrate into browser plugins or what have you.
See http://tidy.sourceforge.net.  We are closing in on our "bug fix" release
(which actually has significantly enhanced HTML handling).  So work will be
commencing on tidylib Real Soon Now.

take it easy,
Charlie


-----Original Message-----
From: Manos Batsis [mailto:m.batsis@bsnet.gr]
Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2001 6:51 AM
To: html-tidy@w3.org
Subject: Tidy for web based app?



Hallo,

Has anyone used Tidy for web based editing applications? I was wondering
if it has been used as an activeX/applet/plugin.
I'm building a web based XML editor and I plan to expand it's
functionality to a document centric interface (mainly for XHTML). I
would also need to dynamically change the configuration (xhtml or not,
doctypes etc).
I would *really* appreciate any pointing on this.

I would also be interested to see docs describing server side
implementations.

Please accept my apologies if you believe this query has no place in
this list.

Kindest regards,

Manos

Received on Tuesday, 30 October 2001 13:54:37 UTC