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What is Tidy?

Tidy is a console application for macOS, Linux, Windows, UNIX, and more. It corrects and cleans up HTML and XML documents by fixing markup errors and upgrading legacy code to modern standards.

libtidy is a C static and dynamic library that developers can integrate into their applications in order to bring all of Tidy’s power to your favorite tools. libtidy is used today in desktop applications, web servers, and more.

Documentation

For everything you need to know about running Tidy head over to our documentation page.

There you will discover how to build the tidy console application for your operating system (if necessary), how to use it, and discover examples of all of the great things that Tidy can do.

Are you a developer? Are you looking for libtidy information? Then feel free to get started with the developer documentation.

Both users and developers of Tidy will find useful Quick Reference and API Reference documentation at our API and Quick Reference site.

History

History

HTML Tidy was created by the W3C’s own Dave Raggett back in the dawn of the Internet age. His original Internet page is still available and gives a sense of the early history: Clean up your Web pages with HTML TIDY.

Satisfied with his work, Dave passed the torch to a dedicated group of maintainers at tidy.sourceforge.net where the important tasks of turning Tidy into a C library and keeping up with developing standards was performed.

W3C members took a renewed interest in Tidy in 2011 and forked the project to github (now redirects to new maintainers), where it featured compatibility with HTML5 via a key contribution from one of the SourceForge key members.

In 2015 a group of concerned developers, users, and software integrators formed HTACG with the goal of revitalizing Tidy, which had fallen into a non-maintained state. As a W3C Community Group, HTACG was deemed worthy by the W3C, and W3C passed ownership of their project to HTACG, where it is currently being developed and prepped for a new, stable, and modern release.

HTACG is also working diligently with the SourceForge maintainers in an effort to harmonize HTML Tidy into a single, stable, solid release once again.

Acknowledgements

HTACG and the rest of the HTML Tidy team want to extend a sincere and heartfelt “thank you” to everyone who made Tidy possible.

Are we missing someone? Issue a pull request against the gh-pages branch of this repository. You will want to edit this file.

Dave Raggett also maintains a long list of acknowledgements at his page.

Get Tidy

Get Tidy

You may already have Tidy on your computer! Many operating systems ship with the tidy command pre-installed. Chances are good, though, that what you have is so outdated that it doesn’t even recognize HTML5.

Grab a binary

HTACG makes available binaries for several platforms available right here. If there isn’t one for your particular operating system then let us know. In the meantime there are a few more options.

Build from source

Building Tidy from source is easier than ever thanks to the efforts of our developers in adopting CMake. Tidy’s source code is available on its github repository.

Install from a package manager

macOS

Windows

Linux

Software using HTML Tidy

mod_tidy is a libtidy based DSO module for Apache 2.0 that parses, cleans up, and pretty-prints the web server (X)HTML output. Read more…

node-libtidy provides server-side JavaScript bindings for libtidy. It aims to provide not only a high-level interface to a complete tidy run, but also offers methods which closely model the libtidy interface.

Notepad++ is a powerful editor, and several people offer a plugin that uses libtidy to do cleaning, indenting, etc. Some version incompatibilites have been noted.

Balthisar Tidy is a free, full fledged text editor for macOS that encourages you to tidy your documents live, during editing.

There are also applications that use the tidy console executable externally to add html cleaning.

Note that items appearing here aren’t endorsements by HTACG or the HTML Tidy Project team, but we do exercise some editorial discretion about what appears here.

How can I report bugs or make feature requests?

If you have a github account (easy and free) we encourage you to make bug reports and feature requests in our issues tracker.

How can I contribute to Tidy’s development?

We welcome code, website, and documentation contributions, and you are invited to join our open community. You can make pull requests for changes you make in our github repo.

Website © 2015-2021 by HTACG — The HTACG and HTML Tidy logos incorporate the HTML5 logo by W3C

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Clean up your Web pages
with HTML TIDY

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 at http://tidy.sourceforge.net.

More recently, Tidy has been extended to support HTML5 and to clean up HTML exported from Google Docs. The source code is available on github, see tidy-html5.

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.

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!

«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.»

Tidy is available as a downloadable binary, as source code (ANSI C), or as an online service at W3C, Info Network, HTML Help’s site Valet and other sites.

Tutorials for HTML and CSS

If you are just starting off and would like to know more about how to author Web pages, you may find my guide to HTML and CSS helpful. Please send me feedback on this, and I will do my best to further improve it.

A new relative to Tidy, HTML Slidy is my open source presentation tool for slides written in XHTML. It provides an accessible alternative to traditional presentation tools like Microsoft PowerPoint. Best of all, there is no software to install, it just works from the Web!

Examples of TIDY at work

Tidy corrects the markup in a way that matches where possible the observed rendering in popular browsers from Netscape and Microsoft. Here are just a few examples of how TIDY perfects your HTML for you:

In Netscape and Internet Explorer this causes everything following the heading to be in the heading font size, not the desired effect at all!

Tidy maps the example to

Tidy inserts quote marks around all attribute values for you. It can also detect when you have forgotten the closing quote mark, although this is something you will have to fix yourself.

Tidy has a comprehensive knowledge of the attributes defined in the HTML 4.0 recommendation from W3C. This often allows you to spot where you have mistyped an attribute or value.

Tidy will even work out which version of HTML you are using and insert the appropriate DOCTYPE element, as per the W3C recommendations.

This is something you then have to fix yourself as Tidy is unsure of where the > should be inserted.

Layout style

You can choose which style you want Tidy to use when it generates the cleaned up markup: for instance whether you like elements to indent their contents or not. Several people have asked if Tidy could preserve the original layout. I am sorry to say that this would be very hard to support due to the way Tidy is implemented. Tidy starts by building a clean parse tree from the source file. The parse tree doesn’t contain any information about the original layout. Tidy then pretty prints the parse tree using the current layout options. Trying to preserve the original layout would interact badly with the repair operations needed to build a clean parse tree and considerably complicate the code.

Some browsers can screw up the right alignment of text depending on how you layout headings. As an example, consider:

Both of these should be rendered the same. Sadly a common browser bug fails to trim trailing whitespace and misaligns the first heading. HTML Tidy will protect you from this bug, except when you set the indent option to «yes».

Setting the indent option to yes can also cause problems with table layout for some browsers:

will look slightly different from:

You can avoid such quirks by using indent: no or indent: auto in the config file.

Internationalization issues

Tidy offers you a choice of character encodings: US ASCII, ISO Latin-1, UTF-8 and the ISO 2022 family of 7 bit encodings. The full set of HTML 4.0 entities are defined. Cleaned up output uses HTML entity names for characters when appropriate. Otherwise characters outside the normal range are output as numeric character entities. Tidy defaults to assuming you want the output to be in US ASCII. Tidy doesn’t yet recognize the use of the HTML meta element for specifying the character encoding.

Accessibility

Tidy offers advice on accessibility problems for people using non-graphical browsers. The most common thing you will see is the suggestion you add a summary attribute to table elements. The idea is to provide a summary of the table’s role and structure suitable for use with aural browsers.

Cleaning up presentational markup

Many tools generate HTML with an excess of FONT, NOBR and CENTER tags. Tidy’s -clean option will replace them by style properties and rules using CSS. This makes the markup easier to read and maintain as well as reducing the file size! Tidy is expected to get smarter at this in the future.

Some pages rely on the presentation effects of isolated

tags.Tidy deletes empty paragraph and heading elements etc. The use of empty paragraph elements is not recommended for adding vertical whitespace. Instead use style sheets, or the
element. Tidy won’t discard paragraphs only containing a nonbreaking space

Teaching Tidy about new tags!

You can teach Tidy about new tags by declaring them in the configuration file, the syntax is:

The same tag can be defined as empty and as inline or as empty and as block.

These declarations can be combined to define an a new empty inline or empty block element, but you are not advised to declare tags as being both inline and block!

Note that the new tags can only appear where Tidy expects inline or block-level tags respectively. This means you can’t (yet) place new tags within the document head or other contexts with restricted content models. So far the most popular use of this feature is to allow Tidy to be applied to Cold Fusion files.

Limited support for ASP, JSTE and PHP

Tidy will cope with ASP, JSTE and PHP pseudo elements within element content and as replacements for attributes, for example:

Note that Tidy doesn’t understand the scripting language used within pseudo elements and attributes, and can easily get confused. Tidy may report missing attributes when these are hidden within preprocessor code. Tidy can also get things wrong if the code includes quote marks, e.g. if the example above is changed to:

Tidy will now see the quote mark preceding ID as ending the attribute value, and proceed to complain about what follows. Note you can choose whether to allow line wrapping on spaces within pseudo elements or not using the wrap-asp option. If you used ASP, JSTE or PHP to create a start tag, but placed the end tag explicitly in the markup, Tidy won’t be able to match them up, and will delete the end tag for you. So in this case you are advise to make the start tag explicit and to use ASP, JSTE or PHP for just the attributes, e.g.

Tidy allows you to control whether line wrapping is enabled for ASP, JSTE and PHP instructions, see the wrap-asp, wrap-jste and wrap-php config options, respectively.

I regret that Tidy does not support Tango preprocessing instructions which look like:

Tidy supports another preprocessing syntax called «Tango», but only for attribute values. Adding support for pseudo elements written in Tango looks as if it would be quite tough, so I would like to gauge the level of interest before committing to this work.

Limited support for XML

XML processors compliant with W3C’s XML 1.0 recommendation are very picky about which files they will accept. Tidy can help you to fix errors that cause your XML files to be rejected. Tidy doesn’t yet recognize all XML features though, e.g. it doesn’t understand CDATA sections or DTD subsets.

Indenting text for a better layout

Indenting the content of elements makes the markup easier to read. Tidy can do this for all elements or just for those where it’s needed. The auto-indent mode has been used below to avoid indenting the content of title, p and li elements:

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