[plt-scheme] Request for pretty-printing in webserver

Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> But this is whitespace in the output which doesn't matter for the HTML
> semantics, which should be pretty much automatic for easy viewing and
> debugging.  If you want your specific style, then it is always
> possible to override the defaults:

But what should the default be?  I think that's part of the disagreement
here.  The webserver assumes that you are producing XML by default, and
that whitespace matters.  I've not used it in a while, but it didn't
used to be that hard to call the pretty printing XML display and give
the webserver strings while you're developing a servlet.  Best of all
worlds, I think.

> Yes -- to generate pretty output, you just do some more work on your
> output routine.  To have a pp pipe, means that you need to parse the
> html which is *much* more work.

...but a solved problem with things like HtmlPrag or even Tidy?

> Definitely -- in the world of non-programmers it is difficult to
> convince people to use your tools, having a human readable and
> editable output is important enough that some of the current users of
> my thing would not use it otherwise.  [...]

So it's good for advertising on the distribution site, but again I think
all we have here is a difference of opinion about whether webserver
defaults to xml or html semantics when outputting, or whether compact
or pretty code should be output for the html.

I'm not sure all commercial packages produce terrible code.  Most do.

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