Hi guys. Well I'm here to ask if Textpad has any (anything) that can help me with formatting the physical code itself. But wait, you haven't heard the important bit. And it's kind of embarrassing . . .
Whenever I post a CSS, HTML or other (PHP, Javascript) thread in any of my web design forums it's like waving a red flag. For some reason my brain has a really hard time negotiating code that wanders around the page indenting itself and selectively adding little spaces.
You would think I was being convicted of murder, so unanimously is my style of coding repugnant to the professional coding community. They hate, absolutely hate my left-block style of coding. They hate my tags in all caps. They hate the escaped lines of "helper text" I insert. They hate any deviation from the standard sequence of elements in each line. My refusal to use "H1" etc. headings is only slightly less offensive than my repeat violations of excessive <br> tags because (to my mind) <p> tags expand my line heights and blow an otherwise professional typographical design concept. I've been insulted, I've had threads I started locked and banished to the site's Archives. I've been criticized for "shouting" (all caps) and pilloried for soliciting the help of other forum members when "the code is only barely recognizable as (fill it in, HTML, javascript etc.)." Believe me, I have tried to adopt the standard but I simply can't read it.
I'm one of these people who prefers to code in plain text, and then drop it into Dreamweaver for fine tuning. So all these years I've used my trusty Textpad to design web pages. Any Textpad Macro would need to reformat the entire page. Bear in mind please: I am not talking about colorizing the code, I am talking about a script/widget that will rearrange lines of code, if necessary; examine everything; and spit out product indented to the standard (whatever that is).
This may be too ambitious, so believe me I won't be offended if Textpad isn't the best option for me. If you have any suggestions I'm open to anything from a Grease Monkey script to an open source program. Oh, I did try something called "Tidy" but I can't see that it did anything (also the name is a bit precious for my taste; get on over here and vacuum if you want to Tidy me heh).
For a while I would drop the text into Sea Monkey which blissfully reformatted with indents. It also overwrote every Hex color I went to the trouble of coding and saddled me with RGB strings I went blind trying to distinguish (there's only so much I can take lol).
Thoughts? Other Open Source/Freeware suggestions? Thank you friends and I'll look forward everyone's thoughts.
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Need a (fairly ambitious) Textpad Macro for HTML
Moderators: AmigoJack, bbadmin, helios, Bob Hansen, MudGuard
"A script/widget that will rearrange lines of code, if necessary; examine everything; and spit out product indented to the standard" is far beyond the capabilities of TextPad macros. I suggest you take another look at Tidy or Dirty Markup or other alternatives.