Some notes on the Cocoon HTML generator.

Links

• Cocoon Wiki docs
• JTidy
• HTML Tidy

Features

• Can generate XHTML/XML from a local file or remote URL
• Configured as generator in sitemap, including reference to properties file for configuring JTidy:

<map:generator type="html" src="org.apache.cocoon.generation.HTMLGenerator">
<jtidy-config>jtidy.properties</jtidy-config>
</map:generator>

• multiple JTidy configs supported by using multiple generator definitions
• caches results based on last modified date of document

Options

Useful options when screen-scraping

Preserves original case of elements and attributes, unless you switch it off with uppercase-tags, uppercase-attributes (HTML/XHTML only)

• add-xml-space=true|false -- generate xml:space="preserve" attributes for pre, style, script. Ensures that whitespace is preserved correctly (as there's no DTD to check it against)
• clean=true|false -- remove presentational markup, and use styles instead. Useful for reducing amount of markup you need to wade through
• numeric-entities -- use numeric entities rather than named entities. Useful as you don't have to worry about declarations.
• enclose-text/enclose-block-text
• char-encoding
• doctype
• output-xhtml -- sets doctype and default namespace. Case is alway preserved, other options ignored
• output-xml