HTML Tidy should support ASP.NET here's how you can help

Back when I was working on BorlandC#Builder I made the decision to incorporate the W3C's HTML Tidy formatting tool directly into the IDE.  It has lots of options and does a nice job of formatting and correcting errors.  There are several ways to leverage HTML Tidy in the IDE, for example when editing an HTML file from the code editor you can select Edit | HTML Tidy | Format Document or Edit | HTML Tidy | Check Document for Errors.  Additionally, you can also select to use HTML Tidy as the default HTML formatter for both HTML and ASP.NET pages.  What isn't obvious is that we had to do a tremendous amount of work to get HTML Tidy to play well with ASP.NET controls but even with all the work we did it still won't format certain ASP.NET controls correctly. 

Since ASP.NET tags are not part of the HTML specification it is necessary to provide Tidy with a list of new tags and how they should be formatted.  Tidy has several options allowing you to control how new tags are formatted using either block, inline, empty or pre.  In C#Builder and Delphi 8.0 we automatically discover any ASP.NET tags within an .aspx page and prepopulate these settings prior to formatting allowing Tidy to format the ASP.NET tags as it would any standard tag.  There are lots of ASP.NET tags and subtags and without this feature it would be incredibly tedious to try and use HTML Tidy to format ASP.NET pages.

One problem however is that some ASP.NET tags support templates, meaning that they can contain fragments of HTML which should not be modified during the formatting process.  Unfortunately, HTML Tidy has no way to deal with ASP.NET templates and will in fact reformat the tag and completely change it's meaning.  As you can imagine this is not a good situation and unfortunately there is no workaround.

HTML Tidy does provide support for various web scripting languages like PHP and ASP and I think as the popularity of ASP.NET grows that it would be great if HTML Tidy could provide support for it too.  If the support can't be built into HTML Tidy then there needs to be some alternative whether it's a callback or some other mechanism that would allow the developer to improve Tidy's ability to deal with tags that it's not familiar with.

Over the past year and a half I've have seen a handful of requests for Tidy to support ASP.NET but unless more people speak up and voice their opinion I'm afraid it will be a long time before that will happen.

Here's where you come in, if you'd like to see this situation improve please visit the HTML Tidy website, get involved either by asking the great set of developers who keep this code base alive to support ASP.NET or by grabbing the code, diving in and adding it yourself (of course read all of the guidelines before doing that).

While you're there also make a case for separating how HTML Tidy options are passed so that things like the Borland IDE's aren't tied to the Tidy config file format.  I'd really like to see the command like option handling separated so that IDE's can load options from whereever they store them whether it's the Windows registry or an INI file or whatever.

A few other notes, I'd like to thank the people who work on HTML Tidy for all of their effort.  They do a great job and have been very helpful and responsive whenever I've had questions.  Additionally, I'd also like to point out that we used Jeffrey Pohlmeyer's TidyPas Pascal interface.  Btw, both of these are mentioned in our IDE's Help | About box.