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Tidy service with ASP

Satheesh Babu
2001/05/13

HTML Tidy is a great tool for cleaning up HTML pages. SOAP is a great way to make reusable web services. This explains how to set up a simple Tidy service using ASP.

Get it and install it

No introduction! Read about SOAP at www.soapware.org. For using Tidy with ASP, see my other article.

1. First, download this zip file.
2. Assuming we are using PWS with home at C:\inetpub\wwwroot, create a folder called c:\inetpub\wwwroot\tidysoap.
3. Extract the zip file to this folder.
4. Open up a DOS window and go to this folder.
5. Run regsvr32.exe c:\inetpub\wwwroot\tidysoap\tidyCOM.dll.
6. If PWS is running, restart it.
7. Fire up IE5+ and navigate to http://localhost/tidysoap/index.html.
8. Copy paste something from a Word doc or another browser window to the WYSIWYG text box on to the left.
9. Click on the empty text box on to the right and you'll see the HTML code corresponding to the left box.
10. Click on "Tidy It". See what happens to the HTML on the right box.

Notes

• See 00readme.txt file first
• The file tidyclient.js is a client side Javascript file that reads the content from the text area box, sends it to the soap service (tidy.asp) and gets the tidied document back into the text box.
• You can easily write a server side script similar to this to call up tidy.asp. Javascript works only in IE 5 or above and if MSXML package is installed (if you don't have it, get it for free from Microsoft.com). However, with Javascript, annoying form posting issues are no longer there.