Clean, beautiful code isn‘t just nicer to look at – it‘s easier to work with. When your HTML is well-formatted, with proper indentation, spacing and organization, you‘ll find it much simpler to update, troubleshoot or hand off to other developers.
Fortunately, there are a wide variety of great tools available to instantly beautify your HTML. In this comprehensive guide, we‘ll explore the top options in 2023 for tidying up your markup and making it look its best.
What Are HTML Beautifiers and Why Use Them?
HTML beautifiers are tools that take messy, difficult-to-read HTML code as input, then format and restructure it to conform to best practices for cleanliness, consistency and readability.
Some of the formatting fixes they typically apply include:
- Proper indentation and nested hierarchy
- Consistent spacing around tags, attributes, etc.
- Appropriate line breaks and structure
- Removal of excess whitespace
- Preservation of comments
The main benefits of using an HTML beautifier include:
Better Readability: With clean indentation, spacing and organization, your markup becomes much easier for you and your team to parse and understand. This makes future maintenance and tweaks simpler.
Increased Consistency: Beautifiers enforce standards for quote usage, spacing, indentation size, etc. This brings uniformity to coding style.
Improved Collaboration: With everyone‘s HTML following the same conventions, it‘s easier to work together without messy merges.
Easier Debugging: Consistently formatted code makes spotting syntax issues, missing tags and other errors simpler.
Faster Coding: Automatic formatting saves the tedious effort of manually cleaning up your HTML.
Following Best Practices: Beautifiers help you use proper conventions and structure right from the start.
The advantages clearly show why it‘s valuable to have a good HTML beautification tool handy whenever you‘re coding up markup. But with so many options to choose from, which should you use?
This guide will highlight the top 6 best tools available in 2023 – covering both online web apps as well as offline/desktop alternatives. We‘ll look in-depth at the features and capabilities of each to help you decide which solution fits your needs.
Top HTML Beautifiers – Online Web Apps
First let‘s look at online web app HTML beautifiers. These run directly inside your web browser, allowing you to paste in markup, click "Beautify" and instantly get back cleaned-up code.
1. Dirty Markup
Dirty Markup is a full-featured and flexible free online HTML beautifier. It gives you various configuration options to control exactly how your markup will be formatted, including:
- Indent Size: Set the number of spaces used for each indentation level
- Indent Type: Configure indentations to use either spaces or tabs
- New Lines: Control whether and where new lines are inserted for improved readability
- Wrap Attributes: Choose to wrap element attributes to new lines after a set max length
Dirty Markup offers an excellent balance of power and ease-of-use when cleaning up your HTML code. The instant preview helps visualize changes before copying the final result.
This beautifier also uniquely provides an API to allow programmatically formatting markup from external tools and scripts for automation.
2. HTMLFormatter
HTMLFormatter from JsonFormatter focuses on simplicity and speed when beautifying your HTML. It doesn‘t offer much in the way of configuration – simply paste in messy code and receive nicely cleaned up markup instantly.
In addition to tidying HTML, JsonFormatter provides utilities for formatting JSON, XML, JavaScript, YAML and more – everything neatly packaged together at one domain. All the tools are free to use with no sign up required.
For basic quick HTML clean up, HTMLFormatter is a convenient bookmark to have handy in your browser.
3. HTML Viewer & Formatter
HTML Viewer & Formatter at Code Beautify provides another solid online solution for beautifying markup. Like JsonFormatter above, the options here are limited – there‘s just a single configuration for indentation spacing.
HTML Viewer does allow uploading files directly rather than just pasting code snippets. And after formatting your HTML, you can also minify it to remove unneeded whitespace and comments for a compressed production-ready version.
Code Beautify packs lots of other web developer tools into one site including editors, converters, validators and more for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, Python and additional languages.
Others
Other decent online HTML beautification tools include:
-
WebToolKit Online HTML Formatter – Has options for indent size, attribute wrap position and whether to preserve comments or not. Allows direct file uploads for formatting.
-
Commercial Software HTML Beautifier – Provides a download link for the formatted result. Allows configuration such as indent preferences and tag case changes.
-
Online HTML Editor – Offers an advanced HTML editor and beautifier in one, allowing direct editing and cleanup of markup. Has undo/redo buttons for convenience. Free with no login required.
Top HTML Beautifiers – Offline/Desktop Tools
While online beautifiers have the advantage of accessibility from any web-connected device, offline desktop solutions integrate tighter into local workflows.
Desktop HTML beautifiers often run as plugins or extensions within coding editors like VS Code. This allows cleaning up markup right as it‘s typed, without tedious copy-paste-format-paste cycles.
Let‘s look now at some of the top offline HTML beautification tools available for download and local install.
1. Prettier
Prettier has earned its reputation as the most popular code beautifier available today. The Prettier philosophy is to auto-format markup, JavaScript, CSS and more based on strict rules – without bothering about lots of configurable options. This opinionated approach ensures uniformity.
Some key benefits of using Prettier for HTML include:
- Seamless integration with editors like VS Code, Vim and WebStorm
- Beautifies HTML as you type for maximum convenience
- Supports JavaScript frameworks like React, Vue and Angular
- Can format additional languages like CSS, JSON and GraphQL
- Has command line interface available for automation
- Open source and free
Since so many developers already use Prettier for JavaScript and CSS, it makes a natural choice for standardizing on a single beautifier tool, especially given its stellar editor support.
Overall Prettier delivers simplicity, great performance, broad language support and tight editor integration – making it a standout option for beautifying HTML.
2. JS Beautify
As the name suggests, JS Beautify started off focusing on JavaScript code formatting. But it has evolved over time to also handle HTML, CSS, JSON and more.
Some key features for beautifying HTML include:
- HTML formatting options exposed via both CLI and JavaScript API
- Configurable with .jsbeautifyrc file or editor plugins
- Customizability for indentation, wrapping attributes, etc
- Preservation of inline comments
- Active support and maintenance
One downside is JS Beautify doesn‘t directly integrate with VS Code as an extension like Prettier. However there are workarounds available to wire it up.
For those who need more fine-grained control over HTML formatting rules than Prettier allows, JS Beautify provides a viable customizable solution.
3. AB HTML Formatter
The AB HTML Formatter Visual Studio Code extension keeps things simple – it has no configuration options whatsoever. Just install, open an HTML document in Code, and hit the shortcut to instantly beautify.
Under the hood AB HTML Formatter uses a homemade algorithm to tidy up markup code. The benefit of relying on its own code rather than external libraries like Prettier or JS Beautify is speed – AB runs extremely fast.
So if you use VS Code and value barebones simplicity combined with good performance, AB HTML Formatter is a suitable option. Lack of customization may be limiting however.
Others
Additional desktop/offline HTML beautifier tools to consider:
-
WebStorm Code Formatter – JetBrains IDE for web development has a built-in formatter accessible via keyboard shortcut or menu. Allows configuring indentation, line breaks etc.
-
HTML Tidy – Longstanding utility for cleaning up markup. Provides options like indent spacing, wrapping attributes, preserving comments and more.
-
Visual Studio Format Document Extension – Simple one-click formatter for VS Code, uses js-beautify algorithm for HTML. No configuration available.
Additional Tools for Working with HTML
Proper indentation, spacing and organization is critical for clean HTML. But there are other tools that can enhance working with markup:
HTML Validation
Linting your code with tools like W3C Validator and HTML Lint catches errors like missing tags, ensuring correctness.
HTML Viewers
Preview your markup in a visual sandbox with HTML viewers like CodePen and JS Bin to catch rendering issues.
HTML To PDF
Convert markup to PDF documents with services like HTML2PDF for publishing, archiving and sharing.
HTML Minifiers
Shrink file size by minifying production HTML with tools like Minify Code and HTML Minifier.
HTML Editors
Streamline authoring content directly in the browser with editors like Froala and CKEditor.
Recommendations for Best HTML Beautification Tool
So with so many capable formatting tools available, which is right for you?
For online use, Dirty Markup stands out as a top pick thanks to its flexibility coupled with an intuitive interface. It covers most common use cases for tidying HTML.
For offline desktop integration, Prettier is hard to go past due to its popularity, broad language support, tight editor integration and ongoing maintenance.
Therunner-up offline tool is JS Beautify which provides finer control over HTML formatting rules when needed.
Take Your HTML to the Next Level
Clean beautiful HTML is a joy to work with. It allows you to code up markup faster while enhancing readability, maintainability and collaboration.
The 6 best HTML beautifiers highlighted above will instantly help you fix sloppy indentation, inconsistent whitespace, ugly line breaks and other common HTML cleanliness issues.
By spending a few seconds to run your markup through a beautifier tool before committing changes, you‘ll save tons of time down the road working with cleaner and nicer looking code.
