[wp-hackers] Outputting Clean Well Indented and Readable X/HTML

Mon Mar 7 21:33:20 UTC 2011

Well put Eric. I couldn't of had said it better myself.

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 1:25 PM, Eric Mann <eric at eam.me> wrote:

> You're always going to run into that problem.  Some PHP scripts in
> particular are written in a way that can break clean outlining of HTML.
>  For
> example:
>
> <?php
> class Example {
>    function this_is_a_function() {
>        ... do something ...
>    }
>
>    static function another_function() {
>    ?>
>    <div>Return HTML</div>
>    <?php
>    }
> }
> ?>
>
> Developers will write the PHP code so that it's presented in a clean,
> readable format ... but the additional whitespace gets dumped in the
> browser
> wherever it's used.  For example:
>
> <html>
> <head>
> </head>
> <body>
>    <div id="header">
>    </div>
>    <div id="wrapper">
>        <div id="content">
>            <?php echo Example::another_function(); ?>
>        </div>
>    </div>
> </body>
> </html>
>
> Once you start making the PHP generate HTML markup, you lose any chance of
> creating clean indenting without an additional tool.  Fortunately, just
> about any in-browser developer tool will compensate for this.  Firebug for
> Firefox and the built-in developer consoles for Chrome and Safari all
> re-create the X/HTML tree from the markup.  They dump the whitespace and
> indenting in the document and re-render everything in a clean, *foldable*
>  format.
>
> So when you're developing and trying to troubleshoot issues, *please* use a
> proper debugging tool.  Even the IE Developer Tools system is better than
> trying to view-source and debug manually.  As far as best practices go,
> it's
> always better to keep HTML generation out of your PHP files, but once you
> start adding multiple plug-ins to freely available themes to dynamic
> JavaScript-generated elements you lose any control over the presentation of
> the source's markup.  The browser can still read it, so use one of the
> browser tools that can both read it and make it easy for you to read as
> well.
>
> On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 12:54 PM, Andy Charrington-Wilden <
> andycharrington at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > That's a great question. I too would like to hear how others deal with
> > this.
> >
> > Andy
> >
> > Jealous Designs
> > Website: jealousdesigns.co.uk
> > Portfolio: jealousdesigns.co.uk/portfolio
> > Phone: 07903030008
> > Twitter: _a_n_d_y
> > Skype: andycharrington
> >
> > Sent from my iPhone
> >
> > On 7 Mar 2011, at 20:34, Alex Andrews <awgandrews at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Dear all,
> > >
> > > Looking at the raw HTML for a site I'm working for, its really
> > > horribly formatted. There is just so much unnecessary whitespace and
> > > bad indenting. It makes it very difficult to work out what is going
> > > on, and occasionally what is going wrong.
> > >
> > > How do other people cope with this? I know there are a few plugins,
> > > but they don't seem to format HTML 5 well. HTML Tidy module for PHP is
> > > unavailable on my server. How can one:
> > >
> > > 1. Use plugins to make HTML output from Wordpress look best.
> > > 2. Have best practices for programming PHP in Wordpress to solve this
> > problem?
> > >
> > > Thanks for all your help.
> > >
> > > All the best.
> > >
> > > Alex
> > > _______________________________________________
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Jesus Lizama
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