Re: [PNG] Jan 23rd meeting topics

My regrets for this call; I will be on a plane at the time.

I agree that we need some sort of tool to catch mismatched tags etc. But 
overall I think Tidy just makes PR harder to read and understand.

On 2023-01-19 08:22, Chris Blume (ProgramMax) wrote:
> 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.

-- 
Chris Lilley
@svgeesus
Technical Director @ W3C
W3C Strategy Team, Core Web Design
W3C Architecture & Technology Team, Core Web & Media