HTML Tidy is a console application whose purpose is to fix invalid HTML, detect potential web accessibility errors, and improve the layout and indent style of the resulting markup. It is also a cross-platform library that can be used by programmers in computer applications to add HTML Tidy's capabilities to them.

History

It was first developed by Dave Raggett ^[2] of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), then released as a SourceForge^[3] project in 2003 and managed by various maintainers.

In 2012 the project was moved to GitHub^[4] and maintained by Michael Smith, also of W3C,^[5] where critical HTML5 support was added.

In 2015 the HTML Tidy Advocacy Community Group (HTACG)^[6] was formed to take over management and development of HTML Tidy as a W3C Community Group.^[7]

Its source code is written in ANSI C for maximum portability and compiled binary files are available for a variety of platforms. It is available under the W3C Software Notice and License (a permissive, BSD-style license). Up-to-date versions are currently available only as source code, cloned from its GitHub git version control repository.

Examples of fixes it can make to bad HTML:

• Straighten mixed-up tags
• Fix missing or mismatched end tags
• Add missing items (some tags, quotes, ...)
• Report proprietary HTML extensions
• Change layout of markup to predefined style
• Transform characters from some encodings into HTML entities

See also

Free software portal

• Comparison of HTML parsers
• CSSTidy

References

External links

• HTML Tidy Project Page
• Current Source Code
• HTML Tidy Project Page (legacy)
• HTML Tidy Online
• HTML Tidy service an online version of W3C's HTML checker (warning: outdated)
• Mozilla/Firefox extension for HTML validation based on Tidy
• Tidy PHP extension overview
• HTML Tidy for Windows, Batch Files for the Command Prompt
• Balthisar Tidy, a GUI version of Tidy for Mac OS X that uses Tidy-HTML5.