Will’s Blog

Here is an email I sent to the aus-dotnet list today that I thought I’d share with my blog readers (well, those blog readers who aren’t also on the list!)

Thought I’d also just copy and paste the exact subject line too

Hi guys,

I know that many web developers on the list and elsewhere are always annoyed
when VS.NET HTML Designer always messes up their nicely tabulated code.

So I’ve got a tip (or more) for you guys that i’ve found to work quite
nicely.

If you’ve got a TextEditor such as TextPad (http://www.textpad.com)
installed, download a plugin called “XML Tidy”. (Available here:

http://www.textpad.com/add-ons)

Then all you need to do is load your .aspx page into textpad, and run the
XML Tidy tool, and it’ll reformat your document nicely.

A few other points of importance:
1) Formatting is done using WhiteSpaces. So, I’ve used another TextPad add
on called Tabout, which converts whitespaces to tabs.
2) XML Tidy expects your document to be well-formed XML documents (which the
ASPX pages aren’t).
It will give you a warning asking if you want to continue anyway, click yes,
and it’ll format it.
3) Also, make sure if you are linking to an external stylesheet using the
<link …> tag, close it by changing it to <link …/>
Basically convert it all to be XHTML compliant. [Eg: <br> changes to <br/>,
<hr> to <hr/>, <meta ...> to <meta .../> etc...]

4) When you add these addons as external tools (as per the instructions) you
can just open the document up in textpad, and they (the tools) will have a
ctrl+1 or ctrl+2, etc… assigned to them for easy/quick access.

At first I was really cautious with it, in case something went horridly
wrong, but after quite a number of successes, I can post and say it worked
quite well.

But as always, be careful, tools can’t always be trusted

I’m sure there is a way to just add it as an external tool for VS.NET. But I
haven’t had time to investigate (after I’ve added it as an external tool in
VS.NET, XML Tidy gives a dialog box “You must pass the window handle of the
window containing the text to be operated on.”).

If you’re happy with messed up HTML then ignore this

Cheers,

William

Oh, and HTMLTidy doesn’t work as well, because from what i’ve read, it doesn’t like the

Update: For replacing all of your <br> tags into <br/>, etc… Just do a find and replace, that is the easiest solution!