Using Tidy Inline Or Locally

Step One: Download Options

The most comprehensive library of Tidy builds are found at SorceForge. 

Tidy comes in different flavors like for PHP, Java and so forth, but as you can see from the menu to the left with the arrow, we selected the HTML version for this demonstration which allows for a local install and when you are offline to use this tool for pages stored on your local computer.

Although as we will explain later, other versions of Tidy allow for online validation and browser inline use of Tidy.
 

After your download of Tidy for use on your local computer, you can browse for  a web page you may wish to inspect for correctness.  Select a local HTML file, activate the tidy button and a list of errors and warnings is then displayed.  Show output will be the cleaned up code by Tidy, which may possibly not be all errors and warnings corrected.
 

In our configuration settings for the local Tidy, we elected to omit the border for graphics since in our XHTML coding, similar elements are controlled by our a CSS.  This example is taken from this web page prior to publication or validation.  Notice that in the revised code the border of zero is omitted, since the default is zero anyway this would have resulted in code bloat.  Also a forward slash is placed before the close of the img src, which is required in XHTML.

Since most users will find that they make repetitive errors, by having a hard copy of the original and revised code, these documents can be compared and errors can be avoided in future coding efforts. Tidy has helped us learn good coding techniques.

Next Page: Online Options
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