[PNG] Jan 23rd meeting topics

Hello everyone,

Our meeting on Jan 23rd will likely be short and sweet. The only topic to
discuss which I am aware of is: Are we satisfied with HTML Tidy?

On one hand, it solves a real problem we've run into before. We once had
mismatched closing tags, which HTML Tidy catches. I do want tooling to help
us catch mistakes before they are merged in.

But on the other hand, HTML Tidy is not idempotent. As a result, it is the
source of significant noise. When I made a change to one part of the
document, HTML Tidy suddenly wanted a change in a totally unrelated part of
the document. If I run it twice in a row, it wants different formatting
after the formatting it just applied. HTML Tidy needlessly complicates pull
requests. Worse, it conflates unrelated changes in one pull request.


We could contribute to HTML Tidy <https://github.com/htacg/tidy-html5> to
improve its shortcomings. We have already improved other tools (for
example, ReSpec) in our journey on the PNG spec. This is a tempting option
because we could get the perfect tool for us.

I took a glance at the HTML Tidy source code. I am not convinced the fixes
we would want are simple enough that they will be done quickly. So even if
we chose this route, we would still struggle against our tooling for a
while.


I think a better option is to remove the HTML Tidy tooling for now. It
simply isn't the magical tool we want yet.

I previously looked at Prettier <https://prettier.io/>, which is another
HTML formatter used by other W3C projects. It is strongly opinionated
(read: not customizable) and those hard-coded opinions don't align well to
our needs.



I would like your thoughts on this.
Should we continue using HTML Tidy to help us catch important mistakes?
Should we perhaps also spend more time investigating why we are struggling
with it? Perhaps we're using it wrong.
Should we remove it? Replace it?

I'll see you all this coming Monday where we can share our thoughts.