HTML Tidy, FireFox Envy and the Command Line

Tidy is a great little HTML lint tool, that goes a lot further than the W3C Validator, but it requires you to remember to run it. The FireFox HTML Validator extension uses tidy and the FireFox status bar at the bottom of the screen to show you tidy output from the current page.

This extension removes the need to run tidy by hand, you get it for free on every page you visit, but it does mean you need to visit any pages you want to run tidy against once you get spoiled by its output. And you will! The biggest annoyance with the tidy command line tool the requirement that pages must be on disk, not on a live website, which isn’t what I wanted. The tidy_page.sh command line script is my little wrapper that could; it wraps tidy and wgets the pages for you. It then displays the results and removes the temp file so no traces remain on disk.

With the addition of a little wrapping script around this and I’ve now got a daily lint check on my main webpages. And you can have one too.