The saga continues, the plot thickens and another idea is plucked from the air and sealed in the Patents office. Good or Bad, a method of ‘Preservation of source code formatting’ has been patented, which was brought to my attention on Mikhail Arkhipov’s Weblog.

Now I know the very subject of ‘Code Preservation’ is an issue with pretty much all developers of WYSIWYG HTML editors, and if some people manage to come up with an idea of how to do this then I wish them all the best. I don’t think there is an issue with them obtaining a patent for their ideas and hardwork, but I wonder if it was really that necessary.

What is the problem that faces us with WYSIWYG editors reformatting the code? As far as I’m concerned it’s not particularly that the editors change my idea as to how the code should be laid out, oh no, it’s merely the fact that the code these WYSISYG editors produce, or what they change my code into, is so ugly and cumbersome to work with. In fact, I wouldn’t mind so much that the editor changes my code, if it tidied it up in the process. Why insist that it acknowledges my changes when it could easily adhere to a set of rules on how it should format the code, as this would solve three issues.

• The editor would not convert my code into a format that is difficult for the developer to read, interpret and debug.
• Any code I entered would be cleaned up and standardised.
• I would not have to correct the formatting after dragging and dropping objects when using the WYSIWYG features.

Personally I adhere to some basic code formatting rules when dealing with HTML, well any language really. But for HTML for instance, I always indent the contents of a container tag, for me that is a tag with a starting and ending tag (disclaimer: Unless this changes how the result looks on the page, which is very possible when viewing in some browsers <cough>IE</cough>).

For example:

<table>
  <tr>
    <td>
      Cell 1
    </td>
    <td>
      Cell 2
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

Now if the editor enforced rules like this then if I made mistakes, or decided to be a little sloppy one day then it would tidy the code for me. If I dragged and dropped objects onto my page, I would be safe and content in the knowledge that the editor was creating neat code for me and I wouldn’t have to change it.

So I shall not breathe a deep sigh, slap my forehead and cry out – “Not another Patent!”. But instead I shall mutter under my breath “What about a compromise?”. Not that I should poo-poo all the effort that went into coming up with the method documented in the patent, but was it really that necessary?