New! Balthisar Tidy 0.60
Balthisar Tidy 0.60 is the HTML cleaner you need!
For years, Dave Raggett’s Unix tool HTML Tidy has been the defacto standard for cleaning, organizing, troubleshooting, and fixing HTML files from a wide variety of sources. Balthisar Tidy is the beautiful Macintosh OS X implementation of this this fine tool. Will virtually all of the features of the command line tool and all of the text encodings that Mac OS X offers, Balthisar Tidy will be helping you post better code in no time!
This Cocoa implementation of Dave Raggett’s HTML TIDY is a free utility for doing all of this. It also works great on the atrociously hard to read markup generated by specialized HTML editors and conversion tools, and can help you identify where you need to pay further attention on making your pages more accessible to people with disabilities.
Go to the downloads area, or download it now, or download the stable (previous) version.
Some FAQ’s about Balthisar Tidy
New Release FAQ’s
Wow! How long has it been?
It’s been about four years now since the last release of Balthisar Tidy. Life’s been busy. I just finished browsing through Tidy’s source code (yeah, compiled and released 0.60 without so much looking at the source). Balthisar Tidy was my “learn to program my Mac” project (after years programming Delphi on Windows), but I pretty much stopped doing anything after releasing Tidy, you know, except for working in Mexico for a year, Canada for another year, buying a new house, building a kitchen from scratch, and that kind of stuff. Now that I’m settled, I hope to take it up again. Rather than start from scratch (and looking at my old source, that’s what it is!), I’ll probably start slow and add some neat new features to Balthisar Tidy.
Cool! Like what new features?
I’m not going to say, nor provide a timeline. That just creates expectations, and I only like to do that for my (paying) supervisor (note: I’m an engineer by profession, not a programmer or anything computer related).
So, what’s changed?
Here are the highlights:
- Recompiled as a universal binary. This means that if you have a Mac with an Intel processor, Tidy will execute as native code. In theory it means it will run faster. On the other hand, Tidy’s an almost pure Cocoa application, and Cocoa already runs native, so speed improvements will be negligable. Besides that, if you know how you interact with Tidy, speed is most definitely not an issue!
- I’ve made the batch mode window menu item invisible. It’s still there; you just can’t see it. Not really much point, because the batch mode window doesn’t work yet.
- I’ve changed the label in the preferences window that refers to batch mode preferences. It now indicates that it’s a forthcoming feature so that you hopefully won’t be confused by having a preference without a batch mode. Good interface standards be damned, this is beta software!
- I’ve upraded the project to XCode 3.0 from the previous Project Builder file. Yeah, Tidy’s that old, but all the same, it’s a testament to how good it already was!
- I’m now distributing the source with Tidy.
General FAQ’s
There are too many options and I don't like the order. What can I do?
For both Balthisar Tidy 0.50 and Balthisar Tidy 0.60, you can eliminate some of the many options if you’re satisfied with Tidy’s defaults. Be aware that I can’t change the defaults; they’re part of TidyLib. Given that warning, you can edit the file optionsInEffect.txt located inside the Balthisar Tidy application package (right-/control-click the application, and Show Package Contents). The file’s located at Contents/Resources/English.lproj/optionsInEffect.txt. Put a hash mark (#) in front of the options you don’t want to see in the Balthisar Tidy application. I’ll make this part of the interface in the future, so you won’t have to look at options you’ll never change.
Where can I find out more about Tidy?
The engine that drives Balthisar Tidy is the unmodified C version of TidyLib by Charles Reitzel. For everything that’s publicly known about HTML Tidy and TidyLib, please consider paying a visit to the Tidy project’s homepage at http://tidy.sourceforge.net.
Is this program freeware?
Yes. Do what you want with it. If you feel absolutely obligated to pay, contact me and I won’t hesitate to allow you.
Can I get support for Balthisar Tidy?
It depends. Feel free to submit bugs to me for the Macintosh portions of the program. The actual tidy’ing process, though, is out of my control, and I feel dedicated to sticking to unmodified versions of Charles Reitzel’s TidyLib. Hence, feel free (and be encouraged!) to take part in submitted bug reports for processing problems at http://tidy.sourceforge.net. Of course if you email me for any type of support not related to HTML processing, I’ll do my best to assist you.
Can I get the source code?
Yes! Download the 0.60 version, and the source code is included. The licensing information is included in the source archive, but for the most part, the original TidyLib is MIT license, my wrapper to it is MIT license, and Balthisar Tidy proper is GPL (any version).
What is Balthisar Tidy’s future?
I plan to enhance and re-release Tidy as I further develop the Cocoa wrapper to TidyLib. I plan to keep Balthisar Tidy completely free as a big THANK YOU to those who’ve done the hard work of writing Tidy. I plan to also write an Object-Pascal wrapper for TidyLib and releasing a nice Windows version. The ultimate goal is to release Cascade 3.0 for the Macintosh (and then later Windows) utilizing the TidyLib code.
Why doesn’t the batch mode window work?
Version 0.60You shouldn't even see the batch mode window now, although the preferences window still contains a reference to it. Just ignore it for now.
Version 0.50As stated above, Balthisar Tidy is a work in progress. The next major release will have a functioning batch mode. Note that 0.60 isn’t a major release. For now, think of it as an interface demo!
Could I see some screen shots?
Of course. Mac OS X 10.2 is shown with version 0.50.
The Main Screen
The main screen scaled to 60%. The options you set take effect immediately on the “Source HTML,” as shown in the “Tidy’d HTML.” The “Tidy Messages” indicate errors in the original code, as well as any corrections that have been made for you.
Preferences Panels
Shots of the Tidy Preferences window, all three pages of it. Remember that batch-mode is forthcoming!