HTML email tidy?

Has anyone successfully used tidy to clean up HTML
email messages?

Considering the importance of email deliverability
and proper rendering in various web-based email
clients and software programs, it is now more
important than ever to ensure that the HTML is
properly formatted.

Using our service, GetResponse, our users are
sending HTML-enhanced email newsletters,
promotions and autoresponder messages. Sadly,
the vast majority of them doesn't validate the
HTML code.

For rendering reasons a properly-formatted HTML
email message differs from a regular webpage, i.e.:
* no <html> </html>, <head> </head>, <body> </body> etc.,
* HTML email content is composed of what would
be located between <body> and </body> in a regular
webpage,
* no <javascript ...>,
* no <head>-embedded or external file CSS styles,
* few external elements (i.e. images), or none at all
(blocked by most clients these days due to security issues)/

Considering the above, validating an HTML email
message with tidy represents a challenge. One
would have to temporarily add the missing tags
just for validation, then strip them down again
before the email marketing campaign is sent.

Is it possible to automate this and configure tidy to
properly validate HTML email messages, or would it
require a unique approach outside of tidy's scope
(a younger sibling, `HTML email tidy`? ;)

Simon Grabowski
http://www.getresponse.com/

Received on Thursday, 4 May 2006 22:40:24 UTC