Nice looking xhtml/html when I "View Source"?

Question

I'm just curious if anyone has any tricks on how to keep source code looking good when you "View Source." I'm militant about keeping my code well formatted and spaced while I'm developing and I tend to "View Source" a lot to double check the output (when firebug is overkill). When I start using RenderPartials and RenderActions and anything in the tag it gets pretty messy.

I don't want to send too many extra characters to the browser to keep file size efficient but is there a way to force the xhtml/html to do a newline or tab? I tried a couple of things that didn't work. Thanks!

Answer 1

Get over it.

Don't worry about how it looks in 'view source'; worry about how it looks in csharp :) If you get worried about the efficiency of the HTML you can gzip it, and other such things.

Answer 2

Just send a \n and it should come out as a newline in the "view-source" section of the browser.

Answer 3

I use firefox's ViewSourceWith extension to view the source in a code editor (in my case SciTe) in which I have a macro programmed so that when I press Ctrl-1 it reformats the HTML using a script I've written.

If validation is the goal then consider using a HTML validator rather than your eyeballs. Total Validator looks good.

Answer 4

Example:

public static String Etc(...)
{
    TagBuilder myTag = new TagBuilder("span");
    myTag.SetInnerText("I'm mr. tag-content!");
    return myTag.ToString(TagRenderMode.Normal) + Environment.NewLine;
}