Re: HTML 5 and Tidy

An updated version of Tidy would indeed be valuable, and could be built
as a post processor to an existing HTML5 compliant parser, see e.g. [1].
This would involve a complete code rewrite. New Postprocessors could
also be written for cleaning up the markup exported by the likes of
Microsoft Office. In all these cases, it is a matter of establishing a
suite of before and after examples as a basis for development and
testing. It is a question of what kinds of clean up are justified, and
what kinds of authoring mistakes (or just sloppiness) it would be worth
addressing.

If I was starting afresh I would consider starting with a browser
extension as the debugging facilities in browsers are now pretty good.
Essentially, read an HTML page (perhaps via XMLHttpRequest), run an
expert system over the DOM tree, then serialize as XML and post back to
the server. Once the code was developed, it could then be ported to a
standalone tool.

So the starting point should be a collection of examples of the kinds of
things that a new version of Tidy could address. What are the use cases,
and low hanging fruit vs medium sized problems vs stretch challenges?

[1] http://about.validator.nu/htmlparser/

On Mon, 2010-10-18 at 00:07 +0200, Marc Gueury wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I know the question will look strange and simple for people deeply 
> involved in HTML 5. Unlike me.
> 
> But here is my problem, Firefox 4 is going out with a lot of changes and 
> I have to release
> a new Firefox version of the extension: Html Validator with a lot of 
> changes.
> 
> So, because HTML 5 is going out of the wood, I try to read about it.
> I would like to be able to check HTML 5 locally too in the browser.
> 
> So,
> * OpenSP and SGML are not able to parse HTML 5 anymore.
> * The official Validator.nu is hugely complex about 300Mb and impossible 
> to ship with a Firefox extension.
> * HTML Tidy does not evolve a lot these days and does not support HTML 5 
> at all
> 
> It is a pity, since I am quite convinced that Html Tidy could be easily 
> modified to
> lead to a simple HTML5 "checker" and "cleaner"  (probably not a perfect 
> one but who cares...)
> 
> I begin to think that I will have to say goodbye to offline HTML 5 
> validation on local machine ?
> 
> The only way will be to validate a HTML page will be to send the HTML 
> page to an external website.
> HTML tidy cleaner will also  disappear....
> 
> It seems a step back to prehistoric times :-)
> I wonder if one of you has some thought about this ?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Marc
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
 Dave Raggett <[email protected]> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett



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