Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
as you are someone who worked on "tidy", i'd have expected that you'd be familiar with this convention, since -- to the best of my knowledge -- tidy uses it...
Absolutely not. In essence, Tidy parses an HTML document into an internal DOM tree, fixing some egregious errors as it goes. Because newline characters are just whitespace in HTML, and multiple runs of whitespace are not significant, newlines are converted to spaces, and runs of whitespace are collapsed, at parse time. A few other fixes are then made to convert the well-formed XML DOM into valid HTML, and then it gets spit back out. Whether any whitespace gets added to the beginning of lines is the user's choice. Personally, I usually turn both indenting and word-wrap off; default values are to wrap at column 68 and use 2 space indentation.