Google Docs generates yucky HTML by jgn on Saturday, September 29, 2007 in Uncategorized

In Google Docs you can create an outline. You know, using our old buddies UL and LI. Hi UL! Hi LI!

But they do something nasty. They close their LI tags, and then if there is a nested list, they put that between the list elements. So you get:

<ul>
  <li>
    Foo
  </li>
  <ul>
    <li>
      Bar
    </li>
  </ul>
  <li>
    Baz
  </li>
</ul>

See that close li right after "Foo"? Wrong! It should be:

<ul>
  <li>
    Foo
    <ul>
      <li>
        Bar
      </li>
    </ul>
  </li>
  <li>
    Baz
  </li>
</ul>

Or the li close tags could be omitted altogether. They've tried to be a little bit XHTML, but it's just not right, because they are putting something that should be contained inside a list element in between list elements.

So now I have to resort to sculduggery to get my stylesheet right, or transform the HTML.

At first Google Docs looked like a good tool, because it seemed to generate clean and simple HTML. But it doesn't. In addition to this issue, they like to pop in extraneous
tags.

For what it's worth, the cute little HTML editor in the newest versions of WordPress gets it right.

I suppose that HTML generation code was written by a summer intern at Writely before they were picked up by Google: It just smells bad.