Windows Developer Power Tools

22.8 Cleaning Up Your HTML with HTML Tidy

HTML Tidy is the only validation service that can actually solve your problems for you. It has the same inputs as the W3C’s offering (see 22.6 Checking Web Pages with the W3C Markup Validation Service), but with many additional options. The only difference in scope between Tidy and the W3C’s validator is that the W3C Validation Service will validate an entire site, while HTML Tidy processes only the page to which you point it.

HTML Tidy at a Glance
Tool	HTML Tidy
Versions covered	http://tidy.sourceforge.net (desktop tool); http://www.infohound.net/tidy/ (web site)
Home page	http://webxact.watchfire.com
Power Tools page	http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/119
Summary	Free open source web (or desktop) tool that will parse your HTML and correct any issues that it encounters
License type	W3C
Online resources	Mailing list, bug tracker, FAQ
Related tools in this book	W3C Markup Validation Service, WebXACT

Getting Started

HTML Tidy is available as both a desktop application and an online service. We’ll focus on using the web site in this article, but the desktop application may be more convenient if you have a large number of pages to validate.

Using HTML Tidy

HTML Tidy allows you to determine what to look at, what to change, and how the results should be formatted. It returns you a version of your page with all of the specified issues corrected. If you want your ...