FrontPage tags - Pain in da HTML

Question

I have a webapplication, developed and ready to be deployed. The web part of it was designed using M$ FrontPage. None of the developers cared about proprietary weird tags that FrontPage inserts into HTML. I don't remember tags on top of my head, but I remember seeing tags such as <webbot> and etc. Now, my client doesn't want to see a bunch of useless tags obscuring HTML when a view source is done. This is not good from a application maintenance perspective too.

I tried googling for tools that would remove these tags from html without unknown side effects and I haven't really found anything useful. Has anyone dealt with this kind of problem before? If you did, did you use any tool for this? or Did you write your own regex based replace utility or something?

Please share your thoughts on this.

Answer 1

Frontpage itself has a code cleaner built in: rightclick on the page when in code view. This gets rid of a lot of the bloat.

While bloat was a big thing a decade ago, it really no longer is a big deal with the fast internet services.

I have a website with tons of graphics, iframes, tables and related webpages, and yet no page file exceeds 65kb.

With optimized graphics each page uploads in less than 2 seconds.

Take a look at http://www.cuyabenolodge.com/amazon-rainforest/cuyabeno-wildlife-reserve.htm to try for yourself. This site has about 200 pages and is quite complex to manage. But it is nothing compared to http://www.birdlist.org and associated sites with 2000 pages.

Only Frontpage has a WYSIWYG navigation editor that allows me to drag a page from one place in the navigation tree to another.

Moreover, this conservation website is from 1997 and has tons of links. Changing to another editor would make me lose all those backlinks.

But more than anything: website building is a commercial activity and time is money. No other software is so time efficient as FP. So all this nagging about code is irrelevant now, because the web has speeded up so much that it is irrelevant and FP has a code cleaner built in.

If the client looks at the code, clean all the white space and he/she will not be able to see anymore whatever he thought unprofessional.

-- A convinced FP user.

Answer 2

HTML Tidy will do a wonderful job of cleaning up just about any mess you can find.

Answer 3

You can remove the FP proprietary tags. I used my own regex to remove starting and ending garbage tags: <\?xx[^>]*> change 'xx' to the tag you are removing.

Are you breaking totally away from FrontPage? If the site is edited in page view, FP will put the tags back.

Also FP likes to control everything and writes a _vti_cnf file for each file it uploads. It gets testy if you ftp from a program that is not FP and that file is missing (especially if you are using FP extensions).

Make sure you put in a DOCTYPE - I don't think FP does that automatically.

Answer 4

For an online solution, you should check out Webmaster-toolkit's Frontpage Code Cleaner.

Answer 5

The final solution to this problem is:

Do not use FrontPage!

I think the reason for not finding any conversion tools is that almost every developer that would care enough to filter the MS-specific tags, has moved on to another editor.

If it is important enough for your client that the source looks reasonably clean, it should definitely be important enough for your fellow developers.