

Comments on April release

From: Jelks Cabaniss <jelks@jelks.nu>
Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 02:29:28 -0400
To: <html-tidy@w3.org>
Miscellaneous comments in no particular order of the April 8th release:

1) With the indent option, you get newlines after the opening and before the
closing tags, something like:

	   Hello World,
	   how are you?

Without it, you get something like:

<p>Hello World.
how are you</p>

While indenting, I find "non-broken" content for block level elements cleaner,
as in:

	<p>Hello World,
	how are you?</p>

i.e.., like the non-indented version, only indented. ... :)

2) "quote-ampersands", while mentioned in the release notes and in the sample,
does not appear to be in configuration file option descriptions.

3) Specifying "indent: no" on XML output doesn't *appear* to work.

4) Maybe the intent is to leave command-line arguments behind for good in favor
of the config file.  But I think common options should be available from the
command line as well.  Specifically -- XHTML output!

5) SCRIPT and STYLE containers should be commented for legacy browsers. Well,
not *just* legacy browsers -- Altavista indexes on uncommented STYLE contents!
:)  (or at least *did*, maybe they've fixed that...)  At least it should be an

6) There should perhaps be a "requested-DOCTYPE: ..." in the configuration file
that would override the current heuristics.  The values could be "Strict",
"Transitional" (and maybe "Omit"?); the rest could be determined from whether
the user specified XHTML output or not.

7) I couldn't see any difference in specifying "new-inline-tags" and
"new-blocklevel-tags" and omitting them entirely in the output of XML-to-XML.

8) What the heck does the "markup: yes|no" option do?  The description says:
"Determines whether Tidy generates a pretty printed version of the markup."
What does this mean?  When is output *not* "pretty printed"?  I couldn't tell
from playing with it -- I'm sure I'm missing something obvious.

9) Is anybody perhaps working on making an ActiveX control out of Tidy, where
you could set properties programmatically instead of reading a config
file/command line arguments?

10) Gotta go. Great program (Thanks, Dave)! :)

Received on Saturday, 10 April 1999 02:30:07 GMT
