Matching/marking HTML tag pairs--?

infidel · 08-03-2005, 01:49 PM

Hello, everyone. I'm in the middle of trying to work the snags out of a nightmarish, multiple-nested-tables HTML document (my last such page; CSS, here I come...). I know that there must be several closing tags missing, but I'm having a hard time eyeballing this lengthy file.

I'd rather not run HTML Tidy or something similar on it, because I don't always like the results. None of my text editors' syntax highlighting appears to be taking notice of anything amiss, although I've already found several open tags on my own. Is there any sort of application or script that simply "matches" tags, perhaps by applying different colors or numbers or something, in such a way that I can see where the openings are?

I've Googled this, but I can't come up with a set of search terms that renders anything promising.

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks very much in advance.

lowpro2k3 · 08-03-2005, 09:21 PM

I just go through and manually tab out elements. When your code looks like this, those errors are much easier to spot.

Code:

<html>
<head>
  <title>Some Title</title>
</head>

<body>
<table border='...' ...>
  <tr>
    <td something='...'>
      <!-- a bunch of stuff -->
    </td>
    <td something_else=''>
      <!-- another table! -->
      <table border='0' width='33%'>
        <tr>
          <td>
            <a href='http://random.net/cgi-bin/login.cgi'>Login</a>
          </td>
        </tr>
      </table>
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>
</body>

I use 2 spaces per logical element, some elements just don't make sense to space out. Some people use 4 spaces, that can be a little much seeing as how HTML gets very nested sometimes. When you're consistent with this type of spacing, you can spot errors easily, because tags won't align properly.

Other than proper spacing, try running the site through one of the W3C validators. Don't try to validate on strict, just copy/paste the appropriate 'transitional' doctype into your code (above the <html> tag), and see the results. The validator can spit a ton of errors at you, but if you step through 1 by 1, and keep uploading your page (or better yet, modifying the page on your live server) you can nail them out pretty fast.

infidel · 08-08-2005, 01:28 PM

Thanks, lowpro. I had actually tabbed everything out like you suggested before I posted, and was still having a hard time tracking everything down. W3C's html validator helped a little. Someone on a LUG mailing list suggested that I give table border colors (why that never occurred to me, I have no idea...), and that did the trick. Now I know exactly how sloppy of an html coder I really am.

Thanks again.