I'm currently working on a redesign of a client's website. The site I'm designing will use only valid, XHTML-compliant, CSS-driven code. The site they have now definitely doesn't.

Last night, whle I was copying and pasting their existant content, remmoving <font> tags, adding missing tags, etc., I had an idea. I remembered that WordPRess uses something called Textile to format posts. Textile is published by Dean Allen and touts itself as "A Humane Web Text Generator." In its most-basic sense, it takes plain text and wraps paragraph tags wherever it sees a skipped line. It also converts illeagal characters, like angle brackets and quotes into their entity codes (&####;). The nice thing about Textile is that is is smart enough to know what is already HTML and it leaves it alone. Therefore, this text:

Code:
Check out <a href="http://www.jaguarpc.com">JaguarPC</a>
won't become

Code:
<p>Check out &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jaguarpc.com&quot;&gt;JaguarPC&lt;/a&gt;</p>
So anyway, back to last night...instead of copying the messy HTML code from their pages, I simply started copying text from the browser to paste into Textile. Then I just had to click a button and I got perfect XHTML! Yes, I lost my links and formatting, but luckily there aren't many links and most of the formatting I didn't really care about, so it was easy to add that stuff back in when necessary.

If you build sites for clients or for yourself and you care about keeping your code valid, check out Textile: http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/index.html

--Jason