[Mediawiki-l] XHTML generation

[Frank Wales]

On Thu, 2005-02-17 at 19:28 -0800, Paul Johnson wrote:
> And what can tidy do that validator.w3.org can't do?

HTML Tidy is a command-line tool that accepts an unreasonable 
number of pretty-printing options, as well as a variety of 
reformatting and syntactic-diddling features.  As it runs 
on your local computer, you can use it off-line, and (more
usefully) you can wrap it in scripts that mangle or wrangle
HTML or XHTML files.

This makes it useful when you want to compare ostensibly similar pages
in horribly different layouts (say, from old and new versions of
software intended to produce equivalent output), as it can reformat
them into mechanically or eyeballically comparable forms.

> Forgive me if I misread this thread, but given that MediaWiki 
> *is* XHTML 1.0 Transitional out of the box, what benefit does 
> it bring us to make it no longer XHTML compliant?  

Oh, I certainly wasn't proposing that it be used on the output
of MW, heaven forfend. Rather, I was jokingly suggesting it as 
a palliative to those who twitch at the sight of inconsistent mark-up. 

Given that the thread began with a misguided concern about 
inconsistent attribute quotes, it came to mind since I believe it
will generate output where the attributes are all consistently
quoted, sorted and generally spiffed up for use in polite company.
-- 
Frank Wales [frank at limov.com]