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What's in Your HTML Toolbox?
Milo_Mindbender asks: "I've just ended up in charge of cleaning up an old and rather large website created by some non technical people. It has all the usual problems: paragraph tags with no ending tag; mixed case file names that work on Windows but not on a Linux webserver; files with mixed Windows/Linux/Mac line endings; duplicates or partial duplicates of files created when working on pages; and the list goes on. I'm wondering what tools you guys keep in your HTML/website toolboxes that work good for cleaning up this sort of mess. Things like pretty-printers, HTML 'lint' programs, dead file detectors, batch renamers (that change links and the files they point to into OS neutral names), and 'diff' programs that ignore HTML whitespace. I'm particularly interested in batch processing tools that actually fix problems (not just report them) because I've got a lot of files to deal with and don't have the time to edit every one by hand. So what's in YOUR toolbox?"
There are two approaches: live with it and make as few changes as possible, or bite the bullet and do a complete rebuild. To do a cleanup, checkout tidy - it does a good analysis of the existing pages and can generate CSS that is OK, but not beautiful. If you want the final pages to look the same, but be standards compliant, see meyerweb.com and read his books on rebuilding pages ("Eric Meyer On CSS" and "More Eric Meyer on CSS"). Pragmatic is his keyword: lots of examples and he makes sense.
Good luck. You're going to need it.
Oops Sorry!
<div class="spacer" style="width:Xpx; height:Ypx;"></div>
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
This is worse than image spacer, please go die in a fire
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Or you could just use the padding / margin features provided by CSS.
margin-top: 1px;
margin-right: 2px;
margin-bottom: 3px;
margin-left: 4px;
or margin: 1px 2px 3px 4px;
padding-top: 1px;
padding-right: 2px;
padding-bottom: 3px;
padding-left: 4px;
or padding: 1px 2px 3px 4px;
My biggest web devel tool is Firefox, with the Web Developer extension and the HTML Validator extension. The former does all sorts of amazingly neat things like letting me get precise info about any element within a page (using "Dispaly Element Information" under the "Information" menu, CTRL+SHIFT+F for short), showing me the HTTP response headers to any given page, add custom styles to a page, validate links, check for Section 508 accessibility compliance, resize the window for simulating lower screen resolutions, and on and on and on!
The latter does instantaneous HTML validation using Tidy and displays any errors or warnings on the "view source" page. It also gives me LINE NUMBERS in the view soucrce window, which is a blessing. The beta version (which I prefer) lets you pick between the Tidy algorithm and the W3C's SGML parser. The SGML parser version gives the same errors as the W3C's own online validator, but without any need to submit the page through an online form.
As for editing HTML, I generally use SciTE or one of its derivatives (eg Notepad2). Sadly, those aren't available under Mac OS X, so when I need to work on a Mac box I use Smultron. THAT, however, is just an editor. People get religious about their editors, so my advice is just to pick one that suits you and ignore anybody what sniggers at you.