Web and Mozilla Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 09, 2025

• HTML Tidy ☛ HTML Tidy

  HTML Tidy was created by the W3C’s own Dave Raggett back in the dawn of the Internet age. His original Internet page is still available and gives a sense of the early history: Clean up your Web pages with HTML TIDY.

  Satisfied with his work, Dave passed the torch to a dedicated group of maintainers at tidy.sourceforge.net where the important tasks of turning Tidy into a C library and keeping up with developing standards was performed.

  W3C members took a renewed interest in Tidy in 2011 and forked the project to github (now redirects to new maintainers), where it featured compatibility with HTML5 via a key contribution from one of the SourceForge key members.

  In 2015 a group of concerned developers, users, and software integrators formed HTACG with the goal of revitalizing Tidy, which had fallen into a non-maintained state. As a W3C Community Group, HTACG was deemed worthy by the W3C, and W3C passed ownership of their project to HTACG, where it is currently being developed and prepped for a new, stable, and modern release.

• • Sean McPherson ☛ Install curl with apt (and not snap)

    I think I need to learn about the differences between apt and snap, and why you would choose one versus the other. If you have a good resources for that, please let me know.

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla ☛ Defending an open web: What the Google search ruling means for the future

      Last week, Judge Amit Mehta issued a ruling in the remedies proceedings of the U.S. v. Google LLC search case. Among the issues addressed, one key aspect that stood out for us was the court’s ruling on Google’s search agreements. 

    • University of Toronto ☛ Why Firefox's media autoplay settings are complicated and imperfect

      In Firefox, this makes it quite hard to actually stop a bad website from playing media while preserving your ability to interact with the site. Did you scroll the page with the spacebar? I think that counts as a user gesture. Did you use your mouse scroll wheel? Probably a user gesture. Did you click on anything at all, including to dismiss some banner? Definitely a user gesture. As far as I can tell, the only reliable way you can prevent a web page from starting media playback is to immediately close the page. Basically anything you do to use it is dangerous.