Is Visual Studio the perfect blogging tool?

I am concerned about markup.  In using the latest build of Windows Live Writer they have come a long way in the HTML engine, but it is still not producing XHTML-compliant markup. It has been almost seven years since XHTML 1.0 was first ratified and yet it seems like we are still fumbling around in the area of getting standardized, clean markup out of our tools. WLW isn't the only culprit.  TinyMCE, which sits behind the scenes on Community Server 2007, also emitted a steaming pile of bad HTML. When will we get this right folks? It can't be all that hard. Given all of the resources in Microsoft, can we just see one HTML editor drive the entire environment?  Visual Studio + Expression Web + ASP.NET and any other product that delivers HTML should drive through the same editor engine (which I would hope produces XHTML strict compliant markup).

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Ben Tiedt said:

Amen.  

TinyMCE has some built-in support for reprocessing browser-generated markup, but it runs client-side and is very slow on large documents.  

CS2007 can be configured via the HtmlScrubber and HtmlNestingCorrectionModule to do much of the same processing server-side (catching both TinyMCE and WLW issues).

I have the configuration for HtmlScrubber that validates XHTML tags/attributes -- I'll probably be blogging about it soon.  Or contact me and I'll send you the config.

I'm still waiting for a killer editor that doesn't require a browser plugin and produces usable XHTML.

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