Taking Stock

Hi All,

This discussion has made me think about the project and ask myself some 
questions.  Has Tidy reached its end of life as a product?  As a code 
base?  These are just my thoughts.  Also, I am sick today, so have some 
time on my hands...

Have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everybody.

Charlie

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-As a Product-

I find myself not using it much anymore.  I just write transitional XHTML 
for web pages.  I do WF xml without thinking much about it.  Not being 
involved with Content Management these days, I have no need to clean up 
other folks' sloppy markup ;-).  If I were, I might just code up something 
much simpler for a small HTML subset.

I tried like heck at one point to use the XHTML so-called modular schema to 
define a useful subset of HTML suitable for content entry.  I could not get 
it to work and received responses from W3C XHTML committee folks that were 
discouraging of the attempt. So a schema based approach does not appear viable.

Many others have come to the same conclusion, settling on these horrid 
Wiki/Forum syntaxes (which remind me nothing so much as nroff/troff 
macros).  But, for many uses, they are more manageable and "user friendly" 
than any W3C markup.

For web developers, there are other, better validators out there, (e.g. 
from the W3C, which I believe Björn had a hand in).

So I am unsure of the niche Tidy fills anymore.  Originally, it was 
motivated by poor standardization across browsers.  DOM and CSS support is 
pretty good nowadays.  HTML is, essentially, done.  HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 
both work well and no one appears interested in XHTML 1.1 or newest 
versions of DOM/CSS.  All the action is in Javascript and Flash.

Do people still use HTML for content entry?  If so, then Tidy still has a 
useful role.  Although, many may want to hack it to suit their specific 
needs, which is the great thing about open source.

Otherwise, it seems Tidy is relegated to cleaning up and transforming older 
content bases.  A worthy task that may carry it for some time.

I guess the other use I still hear about is as a learning tool.  Tidy gives 
diagnostics on "dumb stuff" that new web developers all do, which is great.

-As a Code Base-

I think the code base has more or less reached its limit.  I see every 
reason why it should live on, performing the tasks noted above.  But we 
have encountered difficulties implementing character encoding support, 
character entity support, CSS validation and cleanup.

To make Tidy relevant to web developers today, it needs these 
features.  These all need to be wired in at a more basic level.  I am not 
saying there is not a lot of opportunity for reuse.  Just that most of that 
reuse will be conceptual.

Content management users of TidyLib want better control over error handling 
and reporting.  Again, this means error IDs and categories need to be baked 
in up front.  These are very very labor intensive to retrofit.

These issues are all well understood by the team and have been discussed at 
great length.  A few have taken a swing at one or more of these 
items.  Sometimes with limited success. But overall, it doesn't bode well.

-Conclusions-

No conclusions.  No decisions.  Just steady on.  TidyLib is a living 
project.  There is no doubt about that.   I just think we shouldn't place 
unrealistic expectations on it's future development.  Of course, someone 
may just take this as a challenge.  In which case, never mind.


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