Checking things are well formed and DTD for XHTML/Petal, was: Re: [Petal] Petal 1.10_09 Released

[William McKee]

On Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 06:27:51PM +0000, patricka at mkdoc.com wrote:
> this is a bit off topic, but it may help you if you've got fubar (x)html 
> from word. tidy can't seems to handle namespaces[1], but this (online only) 
> utility[2] seems to do the trick. 

Hey Patrick,

Thanks for the links. I've also seen a tool called demoroniser. I don't
think this subject is off-topic at all since Petal essentially rewrites
my html and can only manage this task if the html is in relatively good
form (depending on the parser you're using).

Actually my fubar html is my own poor coding practices. However, I won't
take full blame since most browsers, as well as HTML::TreeBuilder,
support fubar html. This is unfortunate and hopefully going to change as
xhtml is adopted.

Using Petal, my html has become cleaner and I have a much better
understanding of the HTML specs. Transferring this knowledge and the
appreciation of standards to the designers I work with is not quite as
easy :(.

I've found that tidy with the proper settings does a good job of
cleaning up my fubar html. However, there are a few things I have to
change (e.g., the use of CDATA tags around style and script tags).

Unfortunately I don't have time to get all of my existing projects
converted to the new format. I really appreciate that Jean-Michel has
taken the time to make 1.10 backwards-compatible so that I can continue
to use the latest & greatest version without breaking all of my existing
apps.

I think a big warning is necessary because otherwise there are going to
be some surprises when users upgrade (of course, I'm also assuming that
there are lots of users who aren't already reading the list :-).

Thanks,
William

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