Re: Fwd: Tidy support for JavaScript

Ivor O'Connor wrote:

[snip]

> Hmmm. A tool for pretty printing html and no support for what is almost 
> always contained in html?

I think this question demonstrates the fundamentally incorrect 
assumption underlying your request.

Tidy is /not/ a tool for pretty printing HTML. Tidy is a tool for 
evaluating HTML and automatically correcting invalid HTML when possible.

As it evaluates the HTML Tidy builds in memory a DOM tree representation 
of the HTML. Some corrections are performed during parsing, and other 
corrections are made to the in-memory DOM. At the end of processing, the 
corrected HTML exists only as an in-memory DOM. A pretty-print routine 
is required when simply for outputting the in-memory representation.

But...

Tidy's pretty print functionality is a consequence of its method of 
evaluation and correction, and not the purpose of the program. It is 
perhaps unfortunate that Tidy's pretty print function is so good that it 
has led people to believe that reformatting was, in fact, the original 
design goal, despite the fact that it wasn't.

Following the usual Linux/Unix practice, Tidy can read from stdin, and 
write to stdout. If you need a true pretty print function you should try 
to find one that can also read from stdin and then use Tidy to 
validate/correct your HTML, piping the output from Tidy to the pretty 
print program. Because XHTML output from Tidy is guaranteed to be 
well-formed, just about any XML pretty print program should be able to 
give you what you need.

Received on Thursday, 7 May 2009 16:17:58 UTC