Curing HtmlTextWriter's Ugly Formatting?

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5079329

Question

I'm creating an ASP.NET server control using the HtmlTextWriter class. My understanding is that it's a nice class to use for making sure my output HTML is valid. I assumed it would format things nicely as well, but it does a bunch of strange stuff that makes the output hard to read.

Are there some settings or something I can play with to get this looking like someone took the time to properly format it, or is it just a downside of using this class? Here are some examples of the ugly formatting I'm talking about:

  • Inconsistent use of self-closing tags. With some tags I get them, and others I don't.
  • Random newlines between tags.
  • Lack of newlines in appropriate places.
  • Mismatched indentation.

This is actually what I'm trying to reproduce:

<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" id="MySWF" width="100" height="100" codebase="https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/swflash.cab">
    <param name="movie" value="/MySWF.swf"></param>
    <param name="quality" value="high" />
    <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" /> 
    <embed align="middle" pluginspage="https://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer" width="100" quality="high" height="100" loop="false" name="MySWF" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" play="true" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" src="/MySWF.swf" />
</object>

...and this is what I'm getting:

    <object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" id="MySWF" width="100" height="100" codebase="https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/swflash.cab">
        <param name="movie" value="/MySWF.swf">

        </param><param name="quality" value="high">

        </param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain">

        </param><embed align="middle" pluginspage="https://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer" width="100" quality="high" height="100" loop="false" name="MySWF" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" play="true" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" src="/MySWF.swf" />
</object>
Was it helpful?

Solution

AFAIK, there aren't any settings for the actual formatting. If you want to format it yourself, that would probably be the best solution. Thou, this would create some overhead, so idk if it's worth it. Here are some open source examples of DIY formatting

http://snipplr.com/view/28048/net-html-formatter/

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottcate/archive/2007/01/10/my-c-code-formatting.aspx

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