Re: double quoted attribute value deleted

"Fred Bone" <[email protected]> Mon, 22 Nov 2010 09:39:39 -0000

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.web.html-tidy.user
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On 20 November 2010 at 13:22, leegold said:

> Hi, 
> 
> Using tidy to clean up an html file before I parse it. I thought Tidy
> would make the process smoother. I was looking for an automated way to
> report and fix for well-formed-ness... I am not an html standards expert
> I'm sure Tidy has good reason for doing the following by default.
> 
> Given a file with content only:  <table class=""datatable""></table>
> I do:  $ tidy  /home/g/Desktop/scrapes/xmlwf2.xml
> I get back:
> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
> <html>
> <head>
> <meta name="generator" content=
> "HTML Tidy for Linux/x86 (vers 7 December 2008), see www.w3.org">
> <title></title>
> </head>
> <body>
> <table class=""></table>
> </body>
> </html>
> 
> So, "datatable" is removed. Why? I ask because tidy removed content here
> and I'm worried about that. Is there a way to make tidy not do that? 

You have two pieces of information attached to <table>:
 class=""   - a valid attribute, which Tidy has retained;
 datatable"" - which is invalid and has been removed.

If datatable is supposed to be a (non-standard) attribute then it needs 
an equals sign separating it from the empty value string (the ""). That 
is, you should put
 <table class="" datatable="">

If it is supposed to be the value of the class attribute then it needs to 
go inside the quotes.

You can't expect Tidy to guess which of these two you meant.