Convert from HTML to XML With HTML Tidy

An anonymous reader writes "HTML Tidy, a powerful tool to help convert old HTML pages to newer standards, such as XML. This tip demonstrates how to convert HTML documents to XML (or more specifically, XHTML) with a simple, open source tool. This conversion is useful for webmasters who are migrating to XML. It can also help XML converts who have to interface with legacy HTML tools."

Comments

libxml2?

[dakkar]

A few days ago I had to convert HTML pages into XHTML, stripping out a few extra elements and attributes. I used xsltproc, from libxslt , which uses the parser from libxml2 , and this has the option of parsing strict HTML into an XML DOM.

XMLTidy can be useful when you have a not-so-strict HTML, but for most quick conversions I've found libxml2 &co to be quite light and easy.

This isn't new...

[in10se]

HTML Tidy has been our for years.

Check out the Tidy Homepage or the project on SourceForge.

Re:This isn't new...

[AShocka]

It's used in

• Cocoon
• Dreamweaver Extentions
• TopStyle
• etc

There's GUI versions, command line versions, etc.

Re:I'll check it out

[in10se]

It's extremely useful for converting the "HTML" generated by Microsoft Office products into nice, clean, well formatted XHTML.

Re:how many years has it produced XHTML ?

[in10se]

Again, it's converted to XHTML for a few years. I only posted the original message because I was quite surprised to see it on Slashdot. It's not uncommon to see a story that is a month or two old on the homepage, but several years old is crazy.

Why use XHTML?

[Alethes]

Ian Hickson makes a good case here that using XHTML may not be the right direction to go -- at least at this point.

Re:Why not use HTML4 then?

[Enrico Pulatzo]

I use XHTML so I can:

1. say that I use XHTML
2. make it easier to parse my pages

HTML 4.01 doesn't make you expressly close your tags, which causes XML processors to choke and die. I'd rather write it in a usable format once than have to Tidy-parse every time I want to update my search engine. Plus XSLT really is cool. I've got (somewhere) a stylesheet I wrote that will validate form data for me and then I can apply other xslt stylesheets to make the output, further seperating the output from the script that does the magic. Great way to update the look of a page without messing up (accidentally, of course) the code I wrote months ago.

BBTidy BBEdit plugin (Mac OS)

[jpkunst]

If you are running MacOS with BBEdit, you can use the BBTidy plugin to get HTML Tidy integration in BBEdit.

JP

Re:how many years has it produced XHTML ?

[LarryRiedel]

The date for the referenced article is 18 Sep 2003, less than two weeks ago.

Larry

Re:how many years has it produced XHTML ?

[kalidasa]

4 years. I remember it being implemented before the XHTML recommendation was final. I remember it particularly because I've been using XHTML on my website since I converted it, then, in 1999, with HTML-Tidy.

Re:news for nerds?

[mhesseltine]

That's because that's invalid markup. When it gets tidied, where would you put the form? inside or outside the table?

Well, from the W3C page on HTML 4.01

The FORM element acts as a container for controls. It specifies:
* The layout of the form (given by the contents of the element).
* The program that will handle the completed and submitted form (the action attribute). The receiving program must be able to parse name/value pairs in order to make use of them.
* The method by which user data will be sent to the server (the method attribute).
* A character encoding that must be accepted by the server in order to handle this form (the accept-charset attribute). User agents may advise the user of the value of the accept-charset attribute and/or restrict the user's ability to enter unrecognized characters.

A form can contain text and markup (paragraphs, lists, etc.) in addition to form controls.

Given that information, I would put the form outside the table element, since the table controls the layout of the form. Besides, shouldn't that be part of tidying up code?