Tools - Refactoring HTML: Improving the Design of Existing Web Applications

HTML and CSS Reference

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the table structure. It is very helpful for people using

non-visual browsers. The scope and headers attributes for

table cells are useful for specifying which headers apply

to each table cell, enabling non-visual browsers to provide

a meaningful context for each cell.

For further advice on how to make your pages accessible

see http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL. You may also want to try

"http://www.cast.org/bobby/" which is a free Web-based

service for checking URLs for accessibility.

Table summaries are certainly a good thing, and you should definitely add one. However, Tidy can't summarize

your table itself. You'll have to do that.

The final message warns you that Tidy found an empty paragraph element and threw it away. This common

message is probably misleading and definitely worth a second look. What it meant in this case (and in almost

every other one you'll see) is that the tag was being used as an end-tag rather than a start-tag. That is, the

markup looked like this:

Blah blah blah

Tidy reads it as this:

Blah blah blah

Blah blah blah

Thus, it throws away that last empty paragraph. However, what you almost certainly wanted was this:

Blah blah blah

There's no easy search and replace for this flaw, though XHTML strict validation will at least alert you to the files

in which the problem lies. You can use XSLT (discussed shortly) to fix some of these problems; but if there

aren't too many of them, it's safer and not hugely onerous to manually edit these files.

If you specify the --enclose-text yes option, Tidy will wrap any such unparented text in a p element. For

example:

$ tidy -asxhtml --enclose-text yes example.html

Tidy may alert you to a few other serious problems that you'll still have to fix manually. These include

A missing end quote for an attribute value, for example,

A missing > to close a tag, for example, <p or </p

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