Cleaning up TWiki's generated HTML

I'm about to embark on upgrading a TWiki installation to the current version, changing over to (and then tweaking) PatternSkin, etc. So, I have equipped myself with assorted useful tools. One of these (the HTML Verifier plugin for Firefox) is giving me quite a few warnings for TWiki's generated HTML. I wonder if it might not be worthwhile to revisit the generation code (etc) to clean up these problems, so that they don't obscure real HTML issues.

Here are some warning messages I've encountered on twiki.org:

 Warning: <a> cannot copy name attribute to id
 Warning: <a> escaping malformed URI reference
 Warning: <textarea> proprietary attribure "wrap"
 Warning: trimming empty <li>
 Warning: trimming empty <option>
 Warning: trimming empty <p>
 Warning: trimming empty <span>
 Warning: trimming empty <style>

I realize that the verifier (based on the Tidy program) is being rather pedantic. However, I suspect that it wouldn't take much effort to clean up the "systematic" problems that afflict all TWiki pages.

Although this could be done manually, it might be worthwhile to consider doing an automated scan of the twiki.org site. This would reveal which warnings are most common, what errors are present, etc.

-- Contributors: RichMorin - 08 Nov 2006

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