Cleaning House: The HTML Cleaning Fix

If you have ever wished there was a convenient way to clean up any mistakes in your HTML, you may be looking for HTML Tidy, a tool that can find and correct errors in your code. Able to seek out the most deeply imbedded errors, HTML Tidy can tidy the markup to make it easier to read and edit.

Available for numerous operating systems, HTML Tidy may be the answer to your HTML problems. You may find HTML Tidy and the updates at http://tidy.sourceforge.net/, but first let’s look more closely at the tidy nature of this program. The History and Design Dave Raggett created the program to fix invalid HTML, improve layout and implement indent style fixes for the markup. It was written under the W3C license and transferred to SourceForge. Written in ANSI C source code, HTML Tidy is very portable, and the binaries available can work with many platforms.

The program is designed to catch problems like missing tags or quotes, mixed up tags and mismatched end tags. Also able to change markup layout style and fix different character encodings to HTML, Tidy fix many of the common HTML errors that may have been overlooked by a designer or a design program. The program was so popular that CSS Tidy was developed to fix the common problems in Cascadian Style Sheet. Whereas HTML Tidy is not equipped to catch common CSS errors, CSS Tidy can swoop in to tidy missing units or semicolons, to reformat and to compress CSS code.

In website design, searching for the elusive HTML mistake could be a time-consuming and daunting task. However, with the help of HTML Tidy, your website could be up and running in less time than you thought, increasing your page rank and drawing in customers.