Reformats compressed HTML with proper indentation; comments are preserved, but <source>, <track>, and <col> aren't recognized as self-closing.
Introduction
HTML pulled from a live website, exported from a page builder, or copied out of an email template is often compressed onto a handful of lines with no indentation at all — technically valid, but hard for a person to actually read. Beautifying reverses that: it rebuilds the line breaks and indentation that make the nesting of tags visible, without changing what the markup does. That matters whenever the goal is to actually read or study the HTML, not just have a browser render it — understanding how a page is structured, checking a student's submitted code, or debugging why something isn't displaying right.
How This Tool Formats Your Code
Pasting HTML in and clicking Beautify rebuilds it with two-space indentation, one nesting level per tag, so it's clear at a glance which elements sit inside which. A few specific things worth knowing about how it handles real-world HTML:
- Comments are kept, not removed. HTML comments, including conditional comments and CDATA blocks, are carried through unchanged — useful if your code includes attribution, TODO notes, or a license comment you need to keep.
<script>and<style>blocks get repositioned, not rewritten. Their indentation is adjusted to match where they sit in the surrounding HTML, but the JavaScript or CSS inside them isn't independently reformatted. If the code inside a script or style block was already messy, it stays messy — only its position relative to the HTML around it gets cleaned up. Use JavaScript Beautifier or CSS Beautifier directly on that inner content if it needs its own formatting pass.
What to Know Before You Use It
This tool handles typical, well-formed HTML well. Two specific things are worth checking before trusting the output on more unusual markup:
- A few self-closing HTML5 elements aren't recognized as self-closing. This tool's list of tags that don't need a closing tag, compared against the current HTML specification's own list of void elements, is missing a few of the newer ones — specifically
<source>(used inside<video>,<audio>, and<picture>),<track>(used inside<video>for captions), and<col>(used inside<colgroup>in tables). If your HTML uses any of these written the normal way — without an explicit trailing/>— everything after that tag can end up indented one level too deep, since the formatter is still waiting for a closing tag that will never come. Writing these tags with an explicit self-closing slash (<source />) avoids the issue. - It doesn't repair broken HTML. If a tag in your original code is never closed, or tags are mismatched, this tool reformats the structure it finds without crashing, but it also doesn't insert a missing closing tag or otherwise fix the underlying problem. The output will still be missing whatever the input was missing — it's a formatter, not a validator.
- Inline tags in the middle of a sentence may get pushed onto their own line. Tags like
<strong>,<em>, or<a>appearing inside a paragraph of running text can end up on separate lines from the surrounding words, since this tool doesn't treat those as "keep inline" the way some other formatters do. This doesn't change how the HTML renders in a browser — whitespace between tags is collapsed either way — but it's worth expecting if you're formatting prose-heavy content with a lot of inline styling tags.
None of this changes what the HTML actually does when a browser renders it — these are all about how the code looks when a person reads it directly, not how a page displays.
When This Is the Right Tool
- Reading a live page's HTML to learn from it. Viewing a website's source or inspecting it through browser developer tools often shows compressed or auto-generated markup with little structure — beautifying it makes it possible to actually study how a page is built, a genuine digital-literacy use beyond formatting your own code.
- Reviewing a student's HTML assignment. Code pasted between editors or exported from a page builder sometimes loses its original formatting; beautifying it before reading makes review and feedback faster.
- Debugging markup that isn't rendering right. Dense, unformatted HTML is harder to scan for a missing or misplaced tag — formatting it first usually makes the actual structural issue easier to spot, keeping in mind that this tool won't fix a genuinely broken tag for you.
If your HTML makes heavy use of <source>, <track>, or <col> tags without explicit self-closing slashes, double-check the indentation after those tags in the output — see the limitation above. For typical page markup, this tool is a fast way to get readable structure without installing an editor or extension.
Example
A student is asked to inspect a real website's homepage and describe how its main navigation is structured in the HTML. Viewing the page's source shows one dense, minified line with no spacing at all. Pasting that into this tool and beautifying it turns it into properly indented markup, making it possible to actually see which <nav>, <ul>, and <li> elements are nested inside which, and how the navigation relates to the rest of the page — the kind of structural reading that's much harder to do on a single unformatted line.
FAQs
Does beautifying change how the HTML renders?
No. Only spacing and line breaks change — the tags, attributes, and content stay the same, so the page renders identically in a browser either way.
Are HTML comments removed?
No — comments, including conditional comments, are kept as-is in the output.
Will the CSS or JavaScript inside my HTML get formatted too?
Not independently. <script> and <style> blocks are repositioned to match the surrounding HTML's indentation, but the code inside them isn't reformatted on its own. Use JavaScript Beautifier or CSS Beautifier directly on that content if it needs its own formatting pass.
Will it fix broken or unclosed tags?
No. This tool formats the structure it finds; it doesn't validate HTML or insert missing closing tags.
Does it handle <source>, <track>, and <col> tags correctly?
Not reliably when they're written without an explicit self-closing slash — content after them can end up indented one level too deep. Writing them as <source /> avoids this. See "What to Know Before You Use It" above.
Is my code saved anywhere?
No. The pasted HTML is processed to produce the formatted result and isn't stored afterward; only the fact that the tool was used is recorded, not the code itself.
Which related tools can I use?
Use JavaScript Beautifier or CSS Beautifier to format the JavaScript or CSS inside your HTML, or HTML Minifier to compress finished HTML back down for production.
