Cleaning Up a Website

Cleaning Up a Website

[John J. Boyer]

Hello,

I have gotten myself committed to maintaining a website that was 
originally created with some Windows program. It is full of redundant 
code, and I need to clean it up so I can see what I am doing. Using Lynx, 
if I just print a page, all the formatting, even paragraph separations, 
vanishes, so I don't even get a good text file. Is there some way to 
preserve at least the separation of paragraphs and headings?

Any other hints would also be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
John


-- 
Computers to Help People, Inc.
http://www.chpi.org
825 East Johnson; Madison, WI 53703

Re: Cleaning Up a Website

[Fredrik Larsson]

Hi,

I suggest running the pages through tidy, the W3C tool for cleaning up
html. It at least will remove redundant html.

If you don't find any <p> tags, chanses are that paragraphs are made using
<span class="x"> and stylesheets to set layout properties for class x.

Another way is to try to find a <meta name="generator" content="..."> to
find out what was used to generate the site. Then you can read something
about how that tool generates code.

Hope that helps!

Fredrik

Re: Cleaning Up a Website

[jude dashiell]

The w3c site has a tool called tidy-html written by Dave Raggett designed
specifically for your needs.

cleaning up a website

[Karl Dahlke]

Use edbrowse.
You can read in the html file locally, or read it off the net.
Enter the b command to browse,
then the w command to write to a file.
All the paragraphs and headings will be there.
Lists too, numbered or bullet,
and a modest attempt at tables,
using | separaters,
although this doesn't always work out that well.

http://www.eklhad.net/linux/app/

Karl