Web editing with mc

["David Martin" <dmartina excite com>]

I use MC as the main tool in the maintenance of our web site. There are some changes I would propose. I know they can be done by users themselves in their user directories, but I think that most of them could do as defaults.

Let's go:

1) The HTML syntax file may be better but it's quite useful. It's been written with uppercase tags and it can be converted to lowercase as stated at the head of the file. HTML is case insensitive, but new XHTML requires lowercase tags. I would convert the file to show lowercase tags (I do it everyday for myself when installing the latest snapshot) and let the user change it to uppercase if preferred.

2) Clean HTML. I use the tidy program found at W3C:
 http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/

I have .mc.menu files spread all over the site with:

+ ! t t
l       Tidy blah, blah, blah...
        tidy -ascii -m -wrap 80 ./%0f 2> err.txt

It would be nice to have this as a standard filter in the editor
(edit.indent.rc), sort of:

    htm|html|HTM|HTML)
    # http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/
        tidy -m -ascii -wrap 80 -f "tidy-$1.log" "$2"
    ;;

Standard error is sent to a log file as it may give some useful
information on the changes done. That's the best choice I got yesterday.

3) About edit.indent.rc. It seems that if any error message is received changes are ignored and the message goes to the editing block. Wouldn't it be better to keep the warning/error in the console before the "Press key" message and maybe have a flag to be used as the error value of the script and to tell mcedit if the buffer ($2) can be used?

(removed 2 "exec" lines)
case .......
    ...........
esac 2>"$3" >/dev/null      
more "$3"
exit $ERR

... and use this ERR value instead of just checking the presence of the cooledit error file.

(Maybe some of these have already been improved in Cooledit?)

4) Viewers: What about trying "links" before "lynx"?

I hope you like them. Little coding and new features.
*8-) David    	 

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