I was in a situation recently where I was working remotely with none of my own equipment and had to edit a rather lengthy article supplied in Microsoft Word HTML.
While Word is easily considered one of the best in the word processing field, the majority agree it aboslutely stinks as an HTML generator. Being required to post this article in as standards-compliant format as possible, I strained at the the thought of manually removing several hundred lines worth of code.
Tidy comes to the rescue! Many of us may have used Tidy individually in the beginning — however it and variations on its function have now been built into so many web development tools we take code cleanup for granted.
I was quickly able to drop the HTML source from the article in question into Tidy and output pristine HTML — saving time and reminding me why I like to keep it simple. Tidy is an excellent example of the KISS theory and why it works for many open source software solutions – keep it simple, focus on a niche and do what you do well.
I happen to keep Mac Tidy, managed by Terry Teague, around on my own gear when not using Macromedia Dreamweaver and BBEdit. The original Tidy resided with the W3C and the current project has been handed off and can be found on Sourceforge.
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