Clean up your Web pages
with HTML TIDY
The maintenance of Tidy has now been taken over by a group of enthusiastic volunteers at Source Forge, seehttp://tidy.sourceforge.net. There you can find the source code and binaries for a very wide range of platforms. Tidy is also available as a library TidyLib, which has been designed for easy integration with other software. This page is now somewhat dated, so for the latest information please visit the Source Forge site.
Introduction to TIDY
When editing HTML it's easy to make mistakes. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a simple way to fix these mistakes automatically and tidy up sloppy editing into nicely layed out markup? Well now there is! Dave Raggett's HTML TIDY is a free utility for doing just that. It also works great on the atrociously hard to read markup generated by specialized HTML editors and conversion tools, and can help you identify where you need to pay further attention on making your pages more accessible to people with disabilities.
Tidy is able to fix up a wide range of problems and to bring to your attention things that you need to work on yourself. Each item found is listed with the line number and column so that you can see where the problem lies in your markup. Tidy won't generate a cleaned up version when there are problems that it can't be sure of how to handle. These are logged as "errors" rather than "warnings".
Dave Raggett has now passed the baton for maintaining Tidy to a group of volunteers working together as part of the open source community at Source Forge. The source code continues to be available under an open source license, and you are encouraged to pass on bug reports and enhancement requests athttp://tidy.sourceforge.net.
If you find HTML Tidy useful and you would like to say thanks, then please send me a (paper) postcard or other souvenir from the area in which you live along with a few words on what you are using Tidy for. It will be fun to map out where Tidy users are to be found! My postal address is given at the end of this file.
The W3C public email list devoted to HTML Tidy is: <html-tidy@w3.org>. To subscribe send an email to html-tidy-request@w3.org with the word subscribe in the subject line (include the word unsubscribe if you want to unsubscribe). The archivefor this list is accessible online. If you would like to contact the developers, or you just want to submit an enhancement request or a bug report, please visithttp://tidy.sourceforge.net.
Tidy can now perform wonders on HTML saved from Microsoft Word 2000! Word bulks out HTML files with stuff for round-tripping presentation between HTML and Word. If you are more concerned about using HTML on the Web, check out Tidy's "Word-2000" config option! Of course Tidy does a good job on Word'97 files as well!
Tidy features in an article by Scott Nesbitt on webreview.com, and more recently onDave Central's Best of Linux, and as tool of the month on Unix Review by Joe Brockmeier, who writes:
"One thing I love about the UNIX philosophy is the idea that each program should do one job and do it really well. There are zillions of small tools for UNIX-type OSes that make life much easier and are hugely useful, but they don't necessarily get written about. They certainly don't receive the same kind of coverage that Apache and Sendmail receive. One of my favorites, HTML Tidy, is a tool for HTML/Web development that I think will interest a lot of folks. HTML Tidy cleans up HTML produced by WYSIWYG editors and such."
