First quickedits, then TidyPlus operations are performed. Let's call that 'expansion'. The preview page displays the results of expansion. The edit box displays the initial input.

The preview page displays the results of expansion.

How confusing, though, for someone who put in one bit of HTML clumsily and is now faced with seeing t li and t blockquote t tt t /p where they're not expecting it.

Oh, now I see the disconnect. I wasn't thinking of showing the html of the expansion, but rather the resulting display. The preview page will show them what the expanded post will look like. In the single edit box below this will be the text they typed.

Sorry -- I was still kind of on one of Jon's suggestions. It would still make debugging an error like the one he cited difficult, though. Hell, it took us long enough to work out what was wrong.

Especially since it may look just perfect on their monitor (Jess's error went unnoticed for years).

Tidy fixes the >> problem. It converts the extra > to the & -gt entity.

I am starting to think this all way over-engineered. Storing what they typed, and displaying the expansion is going to gather up 99% of the cases. The remaining 1% won't break the board. We can give the poster a private message in that 1% where the post doesn't look right.

Liese's point about hassle-screens is solid, too. In the vast majortiy of cases the poster will accept the changes, so it just becomes a "Nyah, nyah! Had to fix your post!" nuisance.

I didn't mean a >> problem, but rather this one:

<font size="-3">
>blah blah blah</font>

Tidy will catch it, but when you display the expansion, it'll look perfectly fine to most people, and even the HTML savvy mightn't get from the source that it's broken.

When you say "storing what they typed and displaying the expansion" do you mean a correction screen, or just correcting and displaying?

Tidy fixes your example, ita, to display this:

blah blah blah.

do you mean a correction screen, or just correcting and displaying?

I mean no preview or correction page, beyond the edit page that is in use now. The edit box will contain exactly what was typed.

In that example, what happens is that t font size=-1 t blockquote t tt blah blah blah t /font t /tt t /blockquote gets sent to tidy. Which it can definitely fix. What was being pointed out by Jon, I think, is that this is an error that occurs on expansion only, and what was being pointed out by me is that if presented with the opportunity to fix this, the error is obscure and hard to see.

However, irrelevant, since you're not talking about preview and fix.

So's I agree with you.

I'm glad my example is getting some mileage because the entities were a bitch to type.

I mean no preview or correction page, beyond the edit page that is in use now. The edit box will contain exactly what was typed.

Under this flow, if someone types bad html, would the post immediately get posted and it would be up to the poster to go into the editpost page? Or would it first go to the edit post page before being posted?

would the post immediately get posted and it would be up to the poster to go into the editpost page?

Yes. Today's flow. No change. In the post-TidyPlus era, there will be very little a person can do to mess up the html. I can't really think of anything, in fact. Building elaborate mechanisms to allow user correction seems unnecessary.

I know this seems a little Polyanna-esque, but there is a lot of diligence in the Tidy code.