Keep It Tidy

Webmasters are often asked to look after HTML documents that were produced by other folks using WYSIWYG editors or word processors like Microsoft Word. Although the use of such editors and word processors simplifies production for many people, the HTML produced by these programs is usually pretty ugly. It might be acceptable in a browser, but it's downright unpleasant to maintain.

In my case, I use DocBook for a lot of documents and SGML&Tools to render HTML from DocBook markup and then tweak it slightly. Although the HTML looks just fine in a browser, it's kind of ugly when you open it up in Vim. Running the output through HTML Tidy makes it easier to read and leaves you with "valid" 4.01 HTML.

Here's a short before and after example of HTML Tidy's handiwork:

DissociatedPress.net


DissociatedPress.net

Site Guide

...

< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN">











DissociatedPress.net

...

Cleaning up after WYSIWYG programs and conversion tools isn't the only thing HTML Tidy is good for, of course. Tidy will also validate your files and correct them, if necessary. You can also tell Tidy to simply check for errors without making any corrections.

Using Tidy

Obviously, the first thing to do is obtain HTML Tidy. It's available from SourceForge and also should be packaged for most Linux distros. SourceForge.net hosts binaries for several flavors of Windows, and for Mac OS X. The site includes links to Tidy binaries for platforms as diverse as Amiga and Atari. (Is anyone still using Atari?) You can also find Windows executables and Linux RPMs.

You can also compile Tidy from source, which is what I usually do when installing Tidy on a new box. It's available under an Open Source license, so if you want to pass it on to your friends, tweak it, or include parts of it in a larger program, you're free to do so, as long as you follow the license.

Running Tidy on a UNIX-type OS is as easy as:

tidy file.html output_file.html

If you want to modify the file "in place" -- that is, write the modified HTML to the same file -- then you'll use the modify (-m) option:

tidy -m file

However, Tidy has many options that you may want to take advantage of. You can pass arguments to tidy on the command line, or you can set up a config file. If you're going to set up a config file -- which I recommend if you're going to use Tidy frequently -- you can either specify the filename on the command line:

tidy -config myconfig.txt file.html output_file.html

Another way to do it is to set the HTML_TIDY environment variable with the name of your configuration file, like this:

export HTML_TIDY=htmltidyconfig.txt

Alternately, you can put it in your .bashrc (if you use bash) to set the variable every time you log in. Here's my config file. It's fairly short, and I'm happy with HTML Tidy's defaults for the most part.

//Zonker's HTML Tidy Configuration File
// I set wrap to 0 because I don't like to wrap HTML.
// The default is 66, you can set this to whatever value you want.
wrap: 0
indent: auto
indent-spaces: 2
wrap-php: no
clean: yes
drop-empty-paras: yes
enclose-text: yes
// This puts any "orphaned" text inside the paragraph element.
// Prevents massive ugliness when using stylesheets.

If you're using these options on the command line, it would look like this:

tidy -c --wrap 0 --indent auto --indent-spaces 2 --wrap-php no --drop-empty-paras yes --enclose-text yes

From Windows to the Web

Tidy has several options that are designed to take files created in Word, or other Windows programs, and clean them up for the Web. One of those options is the "char-encoding" option. By setting the option to "ascii" or "latin1," Tidy will convert characters to entities that will display correctly in all browsers. For instance, when set to "char-encoding: ascii" (the default), Tidy converts any characters above 127 to entities. When set to "char-encoding: latin1" Tidy converts characters above 255 to entities. This is a good way to get rid of characters -- like the alleged "smart quotes" -- that won't display properly on *nix systems and replace them with entities that the browser will understand.

Tidy also has a "word-2000" option that can strip out the fluff from HTML documents generated in Word 2000. This is particularly handy when you're getting documents from marketing that need to be cleaned up and put on the Web. The folks in marketing can write in a tool they're familiar and comfortable with, and you can translate that document to valid HTML quickly and easily. Everybody's happy.

Much of this content was originally part of a Tool of the Month column for UnixReview.com. Since the content is only available from Archive.org at this point, I've cleaned it up a bit and reposted to keep it available.

                          

Mozilla Messaging is looking forward to a big year in 2010 including Thunderbird 3.1 and figuring out how to make the project financially sustainable. Making Thunderbird better is the easier part. Figuring out how to make money as a project is another story entirely.

No doubt the next release of Thunderbird, currently code-named Lanikai, will do a lot to win users. Lanikai will focus on making the upgrade from Thunderbird 2 more gradual, and improving on the Thunderbird 3 platform. This means fixes for IMAP, stability and memory improvements, interface enhancements, and improvements to message filters and Smart Folders. The 3.1 release is avoiding disruptive changes and the team is shooting for a May release. The bigger challenge ahead for Moz Messaging is how to pay for itself.

Read the rest on OStatic...

                          

The screen utility is a "window manager" that allows you to organize and work with multiple shell sessions in a very powerful way. Utilizing screen, you can manage shell sessions in all kinds of useful ways. This tutorial will show you how to display two or more sessions simultaneously in the same window, "detach" from a session and log in later, and even log into the same session from more than one system.

Read the rest of this tutorial on Linux.com

                          

Sun used to boast that it was one of the largest contributors to open source. That's being demonstrated now that Oracle has acquired the company. Oracle's acquisition of Sun, and subsequent layoffs, are having ripple effects on the open source community. The cuts are also hitting the GNOME accessibility (a11y) team and leading the project to think about the future of a11y efforts in GNOME.

Last week Oracle laid off two members of Sun's Accessibility Program Office (APO), including GNOME a11y team lead, Willie Walker. Joanmarie Diggs, who works with the team contributing to GNOME's Orca screen reader, says that as a result of the layoffs that "the accessibility of the GNOME desktop will become the open source equivalent of an unfunded mandate, doomed ultimately to fail," if Oracle doesn't reverse its position or if another company doesn't step up to help.

Read the full story on OStatic

                          

If this is your first time writing a script, don't worry — shell scripting is not that complicated. That is, you can do some complicated things with shell scripts, but you can get there over time. If you know how to run commands at the command line, you can learn to write simple scripts in just 10 minutes. All you need is a text editor and an idea of what you want to do. Start small and use scripts to automate small tasks. Over time you can build on what you know and wind up doing more and more with scripts.

Read the rest on Linux.com

                          

Front page of the LESS Web site

You never get a second chance to make a first impression. The old cliche is true, and it applies to the Web sites of FLOSS projects as surely as it does a first date or a job interview. Unfortunately, all too many FLOSS Web sites make a very, very poor first impression. Not surprising, since many FLOSS developers are much more talented at coding than they are at Web site design. How to fix the problem?

Sawyer X writes about "marketing the entire box," and how it relates to Perl, Ruby, Python, and PHP. Specifically, he notes that many Ruby sites have beautiful sites not because they understand how to design sites better, but because they view sites as part of the product:

Ruby programmers see the marketing as relating to not just the product, but its wrapper. That is, that many Ruby programmers understand at a very core level (more than most programmers - at least me) that the website which shows the project is the actual wrapper of the project and is just as important, if not more so.

The same is true of any project. Users and contributors look at a site and form a first impression based on the look of the site before they ever take the time to download code and install it. It's hard not to look at sites like the LESS site or the Banshee Project and think that the projects are going to be solid and more professional because the sites are solid and professional looking. On top of the visual impact, the sites are well-designed and easy to navigate. So when a potential user decides to take the next steps, they can find what they're looking for in a hurry.

But so many sites look amateurish and just plain ugly. Unless you're already motivated to use the project, there's a good chance you're going to turn around and go to the next project. I'm not saying CPAN sites are ugly, by the way -- but the LESS site is far more appealing, wouldn't you agree? Sure, Perl developers may be fine with the existing CPAN design. It's functional. They understand the layout. It's part of the Perl culture, etc. But marketing a project isn't just about making the existing community happy, it's about attracting new members and growing and changing to fit their needs.

Standard CPAN Project Page

I'm glad to see Sawyer X (presumably not his real name) putting out a call for help to beautify Perl projects. On a larger scale, how could the FLOSS community harness the talents of Web designers who might want to contribute to FLOSS projects or simply find projects to showcase their skills? Or perhaps provide some site templates that allow developers to simply plug in details and wind up with a prettified site?

This is a topic that has grabbed my interest not just because of the marketing FLOSS angle, which is important, but also because I've been tweaking my own site design. While it's fun, site design is not one of my core skills. I can mangle HTML just fine, but actually making things look pretty from a Web design angle... not so much one of my strengths. Better resources for site design would be greatly helpful!

                          

It's interesting how many add-on applications one can find to help fix inherent problems with Windows. Anti-viruses, de-fragging utilities, registry tools, and so on. Linux may have its problems, but I haven't had to defrag a hard drive in about 10 years, or worry about running an anti-virus of any kind.

Spring cleaning for the files system is another story entirely. I tend to wind up with a ton of file clutter after using a machine for a few weeks, much less a full year. Lately I've been trying to keep it under control a bit more by arranging work files in a more strict directory structure (and making sure that it's backed up) and weeding out the Downloads directory at least once a week, getting rid of files I won't need again (like ISOs that have been burned to CD) and filing away PDFs and other documents I might need again.

One piece of advice in the WebWorkerDaily is good for all of us: Shut down that machine and do a good cleaning. Get some canned air and blow the dust out of the sucker, especially the vents around fans and so forth. If you have a desktop machine, at least once a year you should pop it open and get the dust out.

                          

Read the full details on the GNOME site.

                          

Dave Neary writes about efforts in the GNOME project to raise money. Neary focuses on fund-raising in particular, something that community projects often struggle with.

Read the rest on OStatic

                          

Are you a fan of PHP? Facebook is. The company has been working behind the scenes to create HipHop, a runtime compiler for PHP to improve the language's performance on Facebook's servers. The company is also friending the rest of the PHP community with its work by releasing its project as open source.

Rumors have been flying for a while, and the news was confirmed on Monday by ReadWriteWeb. Facebook gave a talk on Tuesday night about HipHop to introduce the technology at the company's headquarters in Palo Alto, CA.

Read the rest on OStatic