When it comes to my markup, I’m anal. It always has to be perfectly indented, easily readable to me, and 100% valid with the W3C. Often time, when viewing the markup of other websites, I’m appalled with the lack of effort by the developer to try to and keep their markup in the browser clean, organized, and valid.
On the flip side, there’s a lot of people who will force all their markup on to one, continuous line for the size saving benefits. This annoys me as well, though not to the same extent because it is done with a purpose. But for the most part, it seems like no developer ever actually looks at their markup in the browser and does anything about it.
Understanding that, to the parser in the browser, indents and spaces (usually) don’t matter, how should I be handling my markup? Is it worth the extra time to get my markup perfectly easily readable to humans as well as the browser? Are all my \t‘s and \n‘s being used in vain?
It’s worth the effort imho since it helps you understand what exactly is going on in your html page, and that’s definitely worth something.
If we want to write clean, elegant code in general this means we should want to generate nice, clean elegant html as well, not?