As a author of web documents, you have an interest in authoring your documents so that most of your readers actually can read it in one of the browsers available. 

Most of my pages in my personal homepage are written as XHTML documents. This is the emerging standard for web documents. It's an XML-based version of the HTML standard, with some important differences such as:

• Tag and attribute names should be written with lower case letters.
• Tags should be closed, e.g. <br> should be written as <br/> or <br></br>.
• All attributes must be quoted, e.g. <a href=""></a>.

For me it is most important that the code is "pretty", commented, and valid with respect to the right standards. This should be true whether you have written the code by hand in a regular text editor (like notepad), or generated it via a WYSIWYG editor (like FrontPage).

This article describes how you can improve the web documents written with the Microsoft FrontPage editor. I will mainly focus on the XHTML part. Microsoft FrontPage is just one out of many editors in which you can create web documents or manage/edit entire webs (collections of web documents). FrontPage is a fairly decent editor that produces good quality XHTML code, however it's not perfect.

1.1 HTML Tidy

HTML Tidy is a tool that can clean up the underlying code (tags) of your web document. Tidy is an open source project originally written by Dave Ragget. It's basically a command line tool that takes a HTML file and generates a new HTML file with cleaner code. The new HTML file is generated with code based upon a large set of rule and layout preferences that you specify either on the command line or in a configuration file (the preferred method).

Read more ...