Refactoring HTML: Improving the Design of Existing Web Applications

Like any other software system, Web sites gradually accumulate “cruft” over time. They slow down. Links break. Security and compatibility problems mysteriously appear. New features don’t integrate seamlessly. Things just don’t work as well. In an ideal world, you’d rebuild from scratch. But you can’t: there’s no time or money for that. Fortunately, there’s a solution: You can refactor your Web code using easy, proven techniques, tools, and recipes adapted from the world of software development. In Refactoring HTML, Elliotte Rusty Harold explains how to use refactoring to improve virtually any Web site or application. Writing for programmers and non-programmers alike, Harold shows how to refactor for better reliability, performance, usability, security, accessibility, compatibility, and even search engine placement. Step by step, he shows how to migrate obsolete code to today’s stable Web standards, including XHTML, CSS, and REST—and eliminate chronic problems like presentation-based markup, stateful applications, and “tag soup.” The book’s extensive catalog of detailed refactorings and practical “recipes for success” are organized to help you find specific solutions fast, and get maximum benefit for minimum effort. Using this book, you can quickly improve site performance now—and make your site far easier to enhance, maintain, and scale for years to come. Topics covered include •    Recognizing the “smells” of Web code that should be refactored •    Transforming old HTML into well-formed, valid XHTML, one step at a time •    Modernizing existing layouts with CSS •    Updating old Web applications: replacing POST with GET, replacing old contact forms, and refactoring JavaScript •    Systematically refactoring content and links •    Restructuring sites without changing the URLs your users rely upon This book will be an indispensable resource for Web designers, developers, project managers, and anyone who maintains or updates existing sites. It will be especially helpful to Web professionals who learned HTML years ago, and want to refresh their knowledge with today’s standards-compliant best practices. This book will be an indispensable resource for Web designers, developers, project managers, and anyone who maintains or updates existing sites. It will be especially helpful to Web professionals who learned HTML years ago, and want to refresh their knowledge with today’s standards-compliant best practices.

Table of Contents:
Foreword by Martin Fowler xvii Foreword by Bob DuCharme xix About the Author xxi Chapter 1 Refactoring 1 Why Refactor 3 When to Refactor 11 What to Refactor To 13 Objections to Refactoring 23   Chapter 2 Tools 25 Backups, Staging Servers, and Source Code Control 25 Validators 27 Testing 34 Regular Expressions  48  Tidy  54  TagSoup  60  XSLT  62  Chapter 3 Well-Formedness  65  What Is Well-Formedness?  66  Change Name to Lowercase  69  Quote Attribute Value  73  Fill In Omitted Attribute Value  76  Replace Empty Tag with Empty-Element Tag  78  Add End-tag  81  Remove Overlap  85  Convert Text to UTF-8  89  Escape Less-Than Sign  91  Escape Ampersand  93  Escape Quotation Marks in Attribute Values  96  Introduce an XHTML DOCTYPE Declaration  98  Terminate Each Entity Reference  101  Replace Imaginary Entity References  102  Introduce a Root Element  103  Introduce the XHTML Namespace  104  Chapter 4  Validity  107  Introduce a Transitional DOCTYPE Declaration  109  Remove All Nonexistent Tags  111  Add an alt Attribute  114  Replace embed with object  117  Introduce a Strict DOCTYPE Declaration  123  Replace center with CSS  124  Replace font with CSS  127  Replace i with em or CSS  131  Replace b with strong or CSS  134  Replace the color Attribute with CSS  136  Convert img Attributes to CSS  140  Replace applet with object  142  Replace Presentational Elements with CSS  146  Nest Inline Elements inside Block Elements  149  Chapter 5  Layout  155  Replace Table Layouts  156  Replace Frames with CSS Positions  170  Move Content to the Front  180  Mark Up Lists as Lists  184  Replace blockquote/ul Indentation with CSS  187  Replace Spacer GIFs  189  Add an ID Attribute  191  Add Width and Height to an Image  195  Chapter 6 Accessibility  199  Convert Images to Text  202  Add Labels to Form Input  206  Introduce Standard Field Names  210  Turn on Autocomplete  216  Add Tab Indexes to Forms  218  Introduce Skip Navigation  222  Add Internal Headings  225  Move Unique Content to the Front of Links and Headlines  226  Make the Input Field Bigger  228  Introduce Table Descriptions  230  Introduce Acronym Elements  235  Introduce lang Attributes  236  Chapter 7  Web Applications  241  Replace Unsafe GET with POST  241  Replace Safe POST with GET  246  Redirect POST to GET  251  Enable Caching  254  Prevent Caching  258  Introduce ETag  261  Replace Flash with HTML  265  Add Web Forms 2.0 Types  270  Replace Contact Forms with mailto Links  277  Block Robots  280  Escape User Input  284  Chapter 8 Content  287  Correct Spelling  287  Repair Broken Links  292  Move a Page 298 Remove the Entry Page  302  Hide E-mail Addresses  304  Appendix A Regular Expressions  309  Characters That Match Themselves  309  Metacharacters  311  Wildcards  312  Quantifiers  313  Index  327