Drupal Beautify Module Released

I did not know about this module (and probably many more) Interesting and well written. Keep those module reviews coming :) Have you thought about posting something on drupalmodules.com?

I must admit that I find it hard to understand why you'd want to introduce extra processing and thus latency on your pages just to make the code look prettier.

If you want to see a nicely formatted tree of your HTML, Firebug should never be more than a few clicks away (and if I may add, it's a lot more useful besides pretty-printing the HTML).

I know Firebug well and could not live without it.

It's just an aspect of the sites we build that I haven't been all too happy with. I really don't want my HTML output looking as sloppy as it does, it gives the wrong impression to anyone who looks. I've had companies audit my HTML code to see if I have high standards when considering me for projects so I do think something that's publicly viewable is important enough to justify a small amount of additional processing, especially when it's cached and can reduce the HTML file size in the flatten or compact modes.

This is something that you would only run for anonymous users so the first time the page is viewed the processed output is stored in the page cache and from then on Drupal would retrive that cache and serve that without running the processing and introducing no latency whatsoever.

It also has other features like fixing and/or warning about bad markup, removing or cleaning up MS Word proprietory tags/characters, and a few other things someone might find useful.

I do see your point in the context you convey it but I've had a numner of people in the Drupal community say they are intested in the module so it must be useful to someone, including myself.

I will be adding in the future a UI for user regex search/replace so I can, for example, fix bad markup introduced by WYSIWYG editors. A simple example would be to replace <span style="font-weight:bold">Text</span> with <strong>Text</strong> etc.

Thanks,

I was just searching the drupal forums for something like this and then did a Google search. I had seen the module previously, but didn't realize it would work for my purposes.

To answer the WHY question for my case. I'm building a site with lots of modules. They add tremendous cruft to the final HTML with class attributes like

class="odd zebra edit-form edit-form-content-type-profile edit-form-content-field-image edit-form-content-field-image-0 left"

And yet, in my final theme, I may simply be using the cascade to style those elements and most of those tags are useless cruft and a waste of bandwidth.

So basically, assuming I can get it to do what I want eventually, it would be like the gzip versus ASCII tradeoff - sacrifice a few processor cycles to reduce the bandwidth.

It's not a simple question as to whether or not it's worth it. That depends on where your bottleneck is, but with file-based caching like boost, I assume that the processor hit will happen only when the cached file expires, whereas the bandwidth hit will happen every page request (or every page request if you don't set Last Modified headers, but that's yet another question!).

The htmLawed module processes the content. Beautify processes the final page after it has been rendered by Drupal. Both methods have pros and cons.

I have it running on a couple of sites right now and it's working well. There are a few little issues to be ironed out but I've not had any spare time to work on this project recently. I was hoping someone might find it useful enough to donate some time.