Splitting output processing to a dedicated module

I've been looking into getting output processing to work and after speaking with Morbus in #drupal found the post by KarenS about abstracting the output processing into htmltidy_output.module http://drupal.org/node/140599#comment-548873.

I have ported the htmltidy.module to 6.x and have been working on the package as a whole to get it both working in Drupal 6 and processing the output. I have no interest in processing node content.

I've also been looking at htmLawed for processing the output but that doesn't handle anything outside of the body tag. I do like the idea of being able to serve compressed HTML (whitespace removal) and that feature is provided by htmLawed.

I'm now thinking it might be easier to create a new project for processing output rather than by input filter or hook_nodeapi. Having both types of feature in a single module seems pointless since users will need one or the other, not both.

If I create a new project it would be specific to processing output only. My personal use-case is code beautification during development and compression for production. I would make the module work with both HTMLTidy and htmLawed.

I would like to know the opinions of the current maintainers of this module with regard to my proposal. Should output processing be an option of the HTMLTidy module or would it be better suited to a dedicated output processing module?