Bug reports (fao Dave Raggett)

Dave,

Having read about it in O'Reilly's excellent "XML in a Nutshell", I
downloaded the Windows .exe version of your Tidy program today from your
page at w3.org, along with the Windows GUI. I ran Tidy on one of my HTML
files to convert it to XHTML and at first sight the result was great - my
XHTML version displayed exactly the same as the original HTML, in IE 5.50
under Windows ME. However I then discovered two major problems, the first of
which seems to make Tidy completely unuseable.

1. When I edit the XHTML file in Notepad or Wordpad (saving as text of
course) and save it again, all the line ends are lost. Refreshing the
display in IE then results in an error dialogue saying "error in line 1,
character 1, object expected". I tried this many times and even if I make no
editing changes in Notepad or Wordpad, but just save the file, the same
problem always occurs.

2. My second problem is a consequence of my HTML writing style. Throughout
my site I have used thousands of anchor names for indexing purposes like
this:

    <A NAME="xyz"><H2>Section heading</H2></A>

Tidy (and presumably the XHTML specification too) doesn't like this. It
wants

   <H2><A NAME="xyz">Section heading</A></H2>

which is probably not unreasonable. What IS unreasonable, however, is that
it completely omits the anchors from the XHTML output instead of changing
the nesting order, and there doesn't seem to be any way of changing that
behaviour in the configuration of Tidy. This again makes your program
unuseable for me unless I write something to pre-process all my files to
change the nesting order myself. The index is an important feature of my
site (though I confess it is a few weeks out of date).

I hope this is useful feedback for you. The first problem is so fundamental
that I can't believe it should occur at all if other people are using Tidy
successfully but I can't see what I could be doing wrong.

You can find the file I used for my first test of Tidy at
www.3bearz.com/diary.html.

Graham

Received on Monday, 19 March 2001 01:32:15 UTC